Welcome to the NDSU Human Visual Perception Lab.
Our vision laboratory is currently conducting a variety of psychophysical experiments aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms underlying human brightness and lightness perception. Our approach involves using human psychophysical techniques, such as brightness matching, cancellation and magnitude estimation to quantitatively investigate brightness and lightness illusions. The study of these illusions reveals the underlying spatial and temporal processing mechanisms responsible for human brightness and lightness perception.
Concurrently, we are involved in the development and testing of several computational models of brightness perception. The ODOG model (Blakeslee & McCourt, 1999), based on a set of oriented difference of Gaussian filters, has been able to parsimoniously explain a large number of induced brightness effects that in the past have been attributed to a wide variety of different mechanisms. We are currently testing a revised version of this model (the Simple-Balanced Gabor model) that is intended to increase the explanatory power of the ODOG model. This new model employs balanced Gabor filters and local (as opposed to global) contrast gain control.
