Recognizing foreground-background interaction

Can the background affect a foreground target in distant, low-quality imagery? If it does, it might occur in our mind, or perhaps it may represent a snapshot of our early vision. An affirmative answer, one way or another, may affect our current understanding of this phenomena and potentially for related applications. How can we be sure about this in the psychophysical sense? We begin with the physiology of our brain's homeostasis, of which an isothermal equilibrium is characterized by the minimum of Helmholtz isothermal Free Energy: A = U - T 0 S ≥ 0, where T 0 = 37°C, the Boltzmann Entropy S = K B In(W), and U is the unknown internal energy to be computed. We assume that a pre-attentive recognition is effortless, meaning A ≈ 0 implying U = T 0 S, Q.E.D. We estimate the early brain vision processing space to be proportional to the size of a digital image. To illustrate the importance of foreground and background interaction by the thermodynamics principle, we further approximate a distant panoramic view of low-quality night vision imagery, in terms of sparse binary macro-pixel features of connected ones and zeros. Then, to estimate the brain energy U = T 0 S consumed in the early vision, we shall compute the entropy of the image. According to Boltzmann, the entropy is a logarithmic function of the phase space W, which are the combinatorial choices to realize the macroscopic condition. We have obtained W ∝ N!/(P 0 !P 1 !P 2 !...), where the total number of macro-pixels N = P 0 +P 1 +P 2 + for the i th class of macro-pixels (i = 0, 1, 2, respectively for zero, single ones, paired ones). Besides occlusion, a natural physical interaction is shadowing, which when viewed, may form paired macro-pixels; ones from the foreground while others are from the background. By computing the entropy reduction due to shadowing which creates a new class of macro-pixels, e.g. edge elements, entropy is decreased as given a constant total number of pixels N, the number of classes, P i , increases in the denominator of W = N!/(P 0 !P 1 !P 2 !...).. We have explicitly computed the entropy and demonstrated indeed that the existence of a physical interaction between foreground and background reduces the thermodynamic energy consumed for early vision. Furthermore, we theorized "aha" could be due to the interaction between background and foreground happening at effortless early vision minimum free energy. Therefore, we mathematically map the well-known physiology "Ganglion response function," namely the Hubel-Wiesel early vision edge map, DoG Laplacian paradigm, or Mexican hat wavelets, into two parameters: (i) the contrast between the foreground (F) and the background (B): -2 ≤ α ≡ I F - I B /I ≤ 2, where the mean intensity I = I F + I B /2 gives the extra factor 2; as well as (ii) the celebrated Herman Haken phase transition base on a nonlinear Hooke's spring constant β > 0 . As a result, we have also proved that disambiguated vision can happen as an instantaneous phase transition without invoking associative memory at the Hippocampus. It seems that this phase transition happens at the early vision of our retinas, then by the LGN, where both optic nerves converge in the middle of brain. We have demonstrated the effortless phenomenon of an "aha" discovery may happen at this early visual stage, rather than the conventional EEG confirmed "event evoked potential" P300 (meaning: 300 ms=0.3 second time spent of neuro-response across the whole brain). A realistic neuropsychology vision experimentation should be conducted based on available high-resolution EEG devices (in non-interference fashion utilizing a wireless head-mount baseball cap) to determine exactly where the "see-no-see" response happen in the brain, and whether it is ahead of the P300 event or not. Without IRB for EEG human subjects, therefore, a preliminary non-invasive vision test has explored with encouraging results through an Internet based delivery system.