Low-level brightness-contrast illusions and non classical receptive field of mammalian retina

Among the visual illusions there is a class, which is known as low-level brightness contrast illusions. These illusions are processed probably at the retinal ganglion cell without necessitating any intervention from higher order cortical processing. The concept of classical receptive field of the ganglion cell, derived from early physiological studies, prompted the idea that a "Difference of Gaussian" or DoG model might reproduce the output of the ganglion cell. In spite of its many successes, the DoG model fails to explain some of these low level illusions. On the basis of recently available physiological data, we have modified the DoG model and have shown the efficacy of the modified model in understanding the low level illusions, a phenomenon that may have potential application in designing new robust visual capturing or display systems.