Contour extraction via contextual modulation

Contour extraction is an important task in image processing and computer vision. The contextual modulation is a universal phenomenon in the primary visual cortex (VI). A biologically motivated computational model is presented for contour extraction in this paper. Two mechanisms of contextual modulation, surround suppression and collinear facilitation, are integrated in this model. We obtain good results via this model to extract contours from images with noise and texture backgrounds. This work provides a biologically motivated approach with great potential for computer vision.