Harmonizing motion and contrast vision for robust looming detection

This paper presents a novel neural model of insect’s visual perception paradigm to address a challenging problem on detection of looming motion, particularly in extremely low-contrast, and highly variable natural scenes. Current looming detection models are greatly affected by visual contrast between moving target and cluttered background lacking robust and low-cost solutions. Considering the anatomical and physiological homology between preliminary visual systems of different insect species, this gap can be significantly reduced by coordinating motion and contrast neural processing mechanisms. The proposed model draws lessons from research progress in insect neuroscience, articulates a neural network hierarchy based upon ON/OFF channels encoding motion and contrast signals in four parallel pathways. Specifically, the two ON/OFF motion pathways react to successively expanding ON–ON and OFF–OFF edges through spatial–temporal interactions between polarity excitations and inhibitions. To formulate contrast neural computation, the instantaneous feedback normalization of preliminary motion received at starting cells of ON/OFF channels works effectively to suppress time-varying signals delivered into the ON/OFF motion pathways. Besides, another two ON/OFF contrast pathways are dedicated to neutralize high-contrast polarity optic flows when converging with motion signals. To corroborate the proposed method, we carried out systematic experiments with thousands of looming-square motions at varied grey scales, embedded in different natural moving backgrounds. The model response achieves remarkably lower variance and peaks more smoothly to looming motions in different natural scenarios, a significant enhancement upon previous works. Such robustness can be maintained against extremely low-contrast looming motion against cluttered backgrounds. The results demonstrate a parsimonious solution to stabilize looming detection against high input variability, analogous to insect’s capability.