Reducing Lateral Visual Biases in Displays
This addresses display quality issues for users in fields like imaging and vision science, though it appears incremental as it builds on known retinal mechanisms.
The paper tackles the problem of visual biases like Mach bands and false contrasts caused by lateral inhibition in the retina, and presents a method that computes a compensated image to cancel these biases when displayed, resulting in reduced perceptual distortions.
The human visual system is composed of multiple physiological components that apply multiple mechanisms in order to cope with the rich visual content it encounters. The complexity of this system leads to non-trivial relations between what we see and what we perceive, and in particular, between the raw intensities of an image that we display and the ones we perceive where various visual biases and illusions are introduced. In this paper we describe a method for reducing a large class of biases related to the lateral inhibition mechanism in the human retina where neurons suppress the activity of neighboring receptors. Among these biases are the well-known Mach bands and halos that appear around smooth and sharp image gradients as well as the appearance of false contrasts between identical regions. The new method removes these visual biases by computing an image that contains counter biases such that when this laterally-compensated image is viewed on a display, the inserted biases cancel the ones created in the retina.