Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A neural model is proposed for human motion perception. The goal of the model is to calculate the tvra-dimensional velxity of elements in an image. Unlilce most earlier approaches,the present model is structured, in accord with known neuro physiological data. Three distinct stages are proposed. At the first level, units are sensitive to the components of motion that are perpendicular to the orientation of a moving contour. The second level integrates these initial motion measurements to obtain translatlonal motion. The third level uses translational motion measurements to compute general three-dimensional motion such as rotation and expansion. The model shows a high level of performance in solving the measurement of two-dimensional translational motion from local motion information. Most importantly, the present model uses nervous system structure as a natural way to formulate constraints. The psychological implications of staged motion processing are discussed