Biomedical subjects

David H Foster

Publications and source records attributed to David H Foster.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Bragg-induced orbital angular-momentum mixing in paraxial high-finesse cavities.

Numerical calculation of vector electromagnetic modes of plano-concave microcavities reveals that the polarization-dependent reflectivity of a flat Bragg mirror can lead to unexpected cavity field distribution for nominally paraxial modes. Even in a rotationally symmetric resonator, certain pairs of orbital angular momenta are necessarily mixed in an excitation-independent way to form doublets. A characteristic mixing angle is identified, which even in the paraxial limit can be designed to have large values. This correction to Gaussian theory is of zeroth order in deviations from paraxiality. We discuss the resultant nonuniform polarization fields. Observation will require small cavities with sufficiently high Q. Possible applications are proposed.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

Colour constancy under simultaneous changes in surface position and illuminant.

Two kinds of constancy underlie the everyday perception of surface colour: constancy under changes in illuminant and constancy under changes in surface position. Classically, these two constancies seem to place conflicting demands on the visual system: to both take into account the region surrounding a surface and also discount it. It is shown here, however, that the ability of observers to make surface-colour matches across simultaneous changes in test-surface position and illuminant in computer-generated 'Mondrian' patterns is almost as good as across changes in illuminant alone. Performance was no poorer when the surfaces surrounding the test surface were permuted, or when information from a potential comparison surface, the one with the highest luminance, was suppressed. Computer simulations of cone-photoreceptor activity showed that a reliable cue for making surface-colour matches in all experimental conditions was provided by the ratios of cone excitations between the test surfaces and a spatial average over the whole pattern.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Directional tunneling escape from nearly spherical optical resonators.

We report the surprising observation of directional tunneling escape from nearly spherical fused-silica optical resonators, in which most of the phase space is filled with nonchaotic regular trajectories. Experimental and theoretical studies of the dependence of the far-field emission pattern on both the degree of deformation and the excitation condition show that nonperturbative phase-space structures in the internal ray dynamics profoundly affect tunneling leakage of the whispering-gallery modes.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

Does colour constancy exist?

For a stable visual world, the colours of objects should appear the same under different lights. This property of colour constancy has been assumed to be fundamental to vision, and many experimental attempts have been made to quantify it. I contend here, however, that the usual methods of measurement are either too coarse or concentrate not on colour constancy itself, but on other, complementary aspects of scene perception. Whether colour constancy exists other than in nominal terms remains unclear.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Recognizing novel three-dimensional objects by summing signals from parts and views.

Visually recognizing objects at different orientations and distances has been assumed to depend either on extracting from the retinal image a viewpoint-invariant, typically three-dimensional (3D) structure, such as object parts, or on mentally transforming two-dimensional (2D) views. To test how these processes might interact with each other, an experiment was performed in which observers discriminated images of novel, computer-generated, 3D objects, differing by rotations in 3D space and in the number of parts (in principle, a viewpoint-invariant, 'non-accidental' property) or in the curvature, length or angle of join of their parts (in principle, each a viewpoint-dependent, metric property), such that the discriminatory cue varied along a common physical scale. Although differences in the number of parts were more readily discriminated than differences in metric properties, they showed almost exactly the same orientation dependence. Overall, visual performance proved remarkably lawful: for both long (2 s) and short (100 ms) display durations, it could be summarized by a simple, compact equation with one term representing generalized viewpoint-invariant parts-based processing of 3D object structure, including metric structure, and another term representing structure-invariant processing of 2D views. Object discriminability was determined by summing signals from these two independent processes.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Uniformity and asymmetry of rapid curved-line detection explained by parallel categorical coding of contour curvature.

The aim of this work was to elucidate several characteristic phenomena associated with rapid curved-line detection in multi-element arrays and to provide a unified account of the underlying curvature-sensitive mechanisms. To this end, a parametric experiment was performed in which the detectability of a curved-line target in a briefly presented planar array of curved-line distractors was measured for a range of target and distractor curvatures and distractor numbers. For both vertically oriented and randomly oriented curved lines, it was found that (1) the dependence of target detectability on target curvature was independent of distractor number for small distractor curvatures but not for medium-to-large distractor curvatures; (2) an asymmetry in target detectability with respect to interchange of target and distractor curvatures occurred only with large distractor numbers; and (3) with small distractor numbers, target detectability depended only on the difference between target and distractor curvatures. These properties of spatial parallelism, asymmetry, and uniformity were explained quantitatively by a minimal model of rapid curved-line detection in which contour curvature was coded in terms of just two or three curvature categories, depending on curved-line orientation.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Scene articulation: dependence of illuminant estimates on number of surfaces.

The ability of observers to detect changes in illuminant over two scenes containing different random samples of reflecting surfaces was determined in an experiment with Mondrian-like patterns containing different numbers of coloured patches. Performance was found to improve as the number of patches increased from 9 to 49. In principle, observers could have used space-average scene colour as the cue ('grey-world' hypothesis) or the colour of the brightest surface in the scene ('bright-is-white' hypothesis), as the two cues generally covary. In a second experiment, observers matched illuminants across different patterns in which the space-average cue and the brightest-patch cue were independently manipulated. The articulation of the patterns was varied: the number of patches increased from 49 (patch width 1 deg visual angle) to over 50000 (patch width 0.03 deg), while the gamut of colours was held constant. Space-average colour was found to be the dominant cue with all patterns except for those with the largest patches.

Color Perception↗

PubMed2002

Statistics of spatial cone-excitation ratios in natural scenes.

For some sets of surfaces, the spatial ratios of cone-photoreceptor excitations produced by light reflected from pairs of surfaces are almost invariant under illuminant changes. These sets include large populations of spectral reflectances, some of which represent individual natural surfaces but not their relative abundances in nature. The aim of this study was to determine whether spatial cone-excitation ratios are preserved under illuminant changes within the natural visual environment. A fast hyperspectral imaging system was used to obtain populations of 640,000 reflectance spectra from each of 30 natural scenes. The statistics of spatial cone-excitation ratios for randomly selected pairs of points in these scenes were determined for two extreme daylights. Almost-invariant ratios were common, suggesting that they represent a reliable property of the natural visual environment and a suitable foundation for visual color constancy.

Color Perception↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Minimum-variance cone-excitation ratios and the limits of relational color constancy.

Relational color constancy refers to the constancy of the perceived relations between the colors of surfaces of a scene under changes in the spectral composition of the illuminant. Spatial ratios of cone excitations provide a natural physical basis for this constancy, as, on average, they are almost invariant under illuminant changes for large collections of natural surfaces and illuminants. The aim of the present work was to determine, computationally, for specific surfaces and illuminants, the constancy limits obtained by the application of a minimum-variance principle to cone-excitation ratios and to investigate its validity in predicting observers' surface-color judgments. Cone excitations and their changes due to variations in the color of the illuminant were estimated for colored surfaces in simulated two-dimensional scenes of colored papers and real three-dimensional scenes of solid colored objects. For various test surfaces, scenes, and illuminants, the estimated levels of relational color constancy mediated by cone-excitation ratios varied significantly with the test surface and only with certain desaturated surfaces corresponded to ideal matches. Observers' experimental matches were compared with predictions expressed in CIE 1976 (u',v') space and were found to be generally consistent with minimum-variance predictions.

Color Perception↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Information limits on neural identification of colored surfaces in natural scenes.

If surfaces in a scene are to be distinguished by their color, their neural representation at some level should ideally vary little with the color of the illumination. Four possible neural codes were considered: von-Kries-scaled cone responses from single points in a scene, spatial ratios of cone responses produced by light reflected from pairs of points, and these quantities obtained with sharpened (opponent-cone) responses. The effectiveness of these codes in identifying surfaces was quantified by information-theoretic measures. Data were drawn from a sample of 25 rural and urban scenes imaged with a hyperspectral camera, which provided estimates of surface reflectance at 10-nm intervals at each of 1344 x 1024 pixels for each scene. In computer simulations, scenes were illuminated separately by daylights of correlated color temperatures 4000 K, 6500 K, and 25,000 K. Points were sampled randomly in each scene and identified according to each of the codes. It was found that the maximum information preserved under illuminant changes varied with the code, but for a particular code it was remarkably stable across the different scenes. The standard deviation over the 25 scenes was, on average, approximately 1 bit, suggesting that the neural coding of surface color can be optimized independent of location for any particular range of illuminants.

Color Perception↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Protanopic observers show nearly normal color constancy with natural reflectance spectra.

The ability of color-deficient observers to discriminate between illuminant changes and surface-reflectance changes in a scene was tested with natural and Munsell reflectance spectra. To avoid the confounding effects of spatial structure, stimuli were simulations of Mondrian-like colored patterns, presented on a computer-controlled color monitor. Protanopes performed less well than normal trichromats, regardless of the type of reflectance spectra, but they were least disadvantaged with patterns comprising reflectance spectra drawn from urban and rural scenes, more characteristic of the natural environment.

Adult↗