COMPUTING STEREO DISPARITY AND MOTION WITH KNOWN BINOCULAR CELL PROPERTIES

Many models for stereo disparity computation have been proposed, but f ew can be said to be truly biological. There is also a rich literature devoted to physiological studies of stereopsis. Cells sensitive to bi nocular disparity have been found in the visual cortex, but it is not clear whether these cells could be used to compute disparity maps from stereograms. Here we propose a model for biological stereo vision bas ed on known receptive field profiles of binocular cells in the visual cortex and provide the first demonstration that these cells could effe ctively solve random dot stereograms. Our model also allows a natural integration of stereo vision and motion detection. This may help expla in the existence of units tuned to both disparity and motion in the vi sual cortex.