Third-Order Edge Statistics: Contour Continuation, Curvature, and Cortical Connections
Association field models have attempted to explain human contour grouping performance, and to explain the mean frequency of long-range horizontal connections across cortical columns in V1. However, association fields only depend on the pairwise statistics of edges in natural scenes. We develop a spectral test of the sufficiency of pairwise statistics and show there is significant higher order structure. An analysis using a probabilistic spectral embedding reveals curvature-dependent components.