A fundamental question in visual neuroscience is how to represent image structure. The most common representational schemes rely on differential operators that compare adjacent image regions. While well-suited to encoding local relationships, such operators have significant drawbacks. Specifically, each filter's span is confounded with the size of its sub-fields, making it difficult to compare small regions across large distances. We find that such long-distance comparisons are more tolerant to common image transformations than purely local ones, suggesting they may provide a useful vocabulary for image encoding. . We introduce the "Dissociated Dipole," or "Sticks" operator, for encoding non-local image relationships. This operator de-couples filter span from sub-field size, enabling parametric movement between edge and region-based representation modes. We report on the perceptual plausibility of the operator, and the computational advantages of non-local encoding. Our results suggest that non-local encoding may be an effective scheme for representing image structure.

A fundamental question in visual neuroscience is how to represent image structure. The most common representational schemes rely on differential operators that compare adjacent image regions. While well-suited to encoding local relationships, such operators have significant drawbacks. Specifically, each filter’s span is confounded with the size of its sub-fields, making it difficult to compare small regions across large distances. We find that such long-distance comparisons are more tolerant to common image transformations than purely local ones, suggesting they may provide a useful vocabulary for image encoding. .We introduce the “Dissociated Dipole,” or “Sticks” operator, for encoding non-local image relationships. This operator de-couples filter span from sub-field size, enabling parametric movement between edge and region-based representation modes. We report on the perceptual plausibility of the operator, and the computational advantages of non-local encoding. Our results suggest that non-local encoding may be an effective scheme for representing image structure.

The topic of this master's thesis is the time lapse from stationary camera images. Unwanted phenomena, which arise in time lapse, were analyzed and algorithms to overcome these limitations were designed. The algorithms were implemented and compared using the captured dataset. The resulting application creates time lapse from the video input and allows users to choose the processing technique including the setting of appropriate parameters.