Foveal scale-space and the linear increase of receptive field size as a function of eccentricity

Tony Lindeberg and Luc Florack

Technical report, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science, Royal Institute of Technology, S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden, Aug. 1994. (ISRN KTH NA/P--94/27--SE)

Abstract

This paper addresses the formulation of a foveal scale-space and its relation to the scaling property of receptive field sizes with eccentricity. It is shown how the notion of a fovea can be incorporated into conventional scale-space theory leading to a foveal log-polar scale-space. Natural assumptions about uniform treatment of structures over scales and finite processing capacity imply a linear increase of minimum receptive field size as a function of eccentricity. These assumptions are similar to the ones used for deriving linear scale-space theory and the Gaussian receptive field model for an idealized visual front-end.

Keywords: fovea, retina, receptive field, scale-space, multi-scale representation, log-polar mapping, visual front-end, resolution, computer vision.

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