Network interactions within a Boundary Contour (BC) System, a Feature Contour (FC) System, and an Object Recognition (OR) System are employed to provide a computer vision system capable of recognizing emerging segmentations. The BC System is defined by a hierarchy of orientationally tuned interactions, which can be divided into two successive subsystems called the OC filter and the CC loop. The OC filter contains oriented receptive fields or masks, which are sensitive to different properties of image contrasts. The OC filter generates inputs to the CC loop, which contains successive stages of spatially shore-range competitive interactions and spatially long-range cooperative interactions. Feedback between the competitive and cooperative stages synthesizes a global context-sensitive segmentation from among the many possible groupings of local featural elements.
Neural networks for machine vision