Dear Colleagues,
It is my pleasure to announce the availability of my Ph.D. dissertation,
completed last year at the Department of Computer Sciences at the
University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Dr. Risto
Miikkulainen.
* See below for the URLs of the dissertation, demo, and software.
Title: Perceptual Grouping in a Self-Organizing Map of Spiking Neurons
Author: Yoonsuck Choe
Abstract:
Perceptual grouping is the process of identifying the constituents in the
visual scene that together form a coherent object. The goal of this thesis is
to understand the neural mechanisms of perceptual grouping. The hypotheses are
that (1) perceptual grouping is carried out through synchronized firing of
neurons representing the same object, and that (2) self-organized lateral
connections encoding statistical regularities of the visual environment
mediate such a synchronization. A self-organizing neural network of spiking
neurons was developed to test these hypotheses in the perceptual grouping task
of contour integration. The network self-organized orientation maps and patchy
lateral connections similar to those found in the visual cortex, and the
contour integration, segmentation, and completion performance measured by the
degree of synchrony in neural populations accurately predicted human
performance. Such results suggest that synchronized activity can represent
perceptual events, and statistical properties of the input can shape the
structure of the cortex and the perceptual performance. By providing a
computational framework where perceptual performance and neural structure can
be compared, the model helps us understand the neural mechanisms of perceptual
grouping.
Dissertation download:
http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/ftp/choe.diss.abstract.html
Software:
http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/src/pglissom-1.1.tar.gz
Demo:
http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/demo/pglissom/
Yoonsuck Choe
Assistant Professor
Deptartment of Computer Science
Texas A&M University
email: choe@tamu.edu
homepage: http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/
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