Occlusion is a primary challenge facing the visual system in perceiving object shapes in intricate natural scenes. Although behavior, neurophysiological, and modeling studies have shown that occluded portions of objects may be completed at the early stage of visual processing, we have little knowledge on how and where in the human brain the completion is realized. Here, we provide functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence that the occluded portion of an object is indeed represented topographically in human V1 and V2. Specifically, we find the topographic cortical responses corresponding to the invisible object rotation in V1 and V2. Furthermore, by investigating neural responses for the occluded target rotation within precisely defined cortical subregions, we could dissociate the topographic neural representation of the occluded portion from other types of neural processing such as object edge processing. We further demonstrate that the early topographic representation in V1 can be modulated by prior knowledge of a whole appearance of an object obtained before partial occlusion. These findings suggest that primary "visual" area V1 has the ability to process not only visible or virtually (illusorily) perceived objects but also "invisible" portions of objects without concurrent visual sensation such as luminance enhancement to these portions. The results also suggest that low-level image features and higher preceding cognitive context are integrated into a unified topographic representation of occluded portion in early areas.

Humans can readily and effortlessly perceive a rich, stable, and unified visual world from a complex visual scene. Yet our internal representation of a visual object appears to be sparse and fragmented. How and where in the brain are such fragmented representations organized into a whole percept? Recent studies have accumulated evidence that some global feature integration is mediated at the early stage of visual processing. However, the spatial operating range of the integration still remains unclear. The present human functional magnetic resonance imaging study provides support that the global integration process in early visual areas, including even the primary visual area V1, is mediated beyond the separated projection of visual hemifields from right and left sides of the fixation to the visual cortex of the contralateral cerebral hemisphere. Retinotopic neural responses corresponding to a visual target were significantly enhanced when another target was simultaneously presented at the point-symmetrical position in the nonassociated visual field quadrant. The result makes a convincing case that the contextual effects involve feedback from higher areas, because there are no direct callosal connections that allow such interhemispheric contextual modulation. This enhancement from the ipsilateral hemifield may help rapid position-andsize-invariant detection of a circular pattern, which may be special among visual structures because of its ubiquity in natural scenes. Early visual areas as well as higher ones may play a more essential role in perceiving the unity of the real world than previously thought.

The productivity of machine tools is significantly improved by using microcomputer based CAD/CAM systems for NC program generation. Currently, many commercial CAD/CAM packages that provide automatic NC programming have been developed and applied to various cutting processes. Many cutting processes machined by CNC machine tools. In this paper, we attempt to find an efficient solution approach to determine the best sequence of operations for a set of operations that located in asymmetrical locations and different levels. In order to find the best sequence of operations that achieves the shortest cutting tool travel path (CTTP), genetic algorithm is introduced. After the sequence is optimized, the G-codes that use to code for the travel time is created. CTTP can be formulated as a special case of the traveling salesman problem (TSP). The incorporation of genetic algorithm and TSP can be included in the commercial CAD/CAM packages to optimize the CTTP during automatic generation of NC programs.

Functional homology between human and macaque visual cortices has provided an important cue to functional subdivisions of the human visual cortex, but it is unclear beyond V1. We estimated the sizes and the visual field eccentricity functions of the extrastriate visual areas of human brains using MRI and fMRI measurements to analyze the interindividual and interspecies variations. We found distinctive features of the area fraction values relative to V1 and the visual field eccentricity functions beyond V2 between the human and the macaque visual cortices. This suggests that selection on color-form and stereoscopic vision, associated with processing and manipulating socio-visual stimuli, may generate variations of the architecture of the extrastriate visual cortex beyond V2.

In almost all of the recent vision experiments, stimuli are controlled via computers and presented on display devices such as cathode ray tubes (CRTs). Display characterization is a necessary procedure for such computer-aided vision experiments. The standard display characterization called "gamma correction" and the following linear color transformation procedure are established for CRT displays and widely used in the current vision science field. However, the standard two-step procedure is based on the internal model of CRT display devices, and there is no guarantee as to whether the method is applicable to the other types of display devices such as liquid crystal display and digital light processing. We therefore tested the applicability of the standard method to these kinds of new devices and found that the standard method was not valid for these new devices. To overcome this problem, we provide several novel approaches for vision experiments to characterize display devices, based on linear, nonlinear, and hybrid search algorithms. These approaches never assume any internal models of display devices and will therefore be applicable to any display type. The evaluations and comparisons of chromaticity estimation accuracies based on these new methods with those of the standard procedure proved that our proposed methods largely improved the calibration efficiencies for non-CRT devices. Our proposed methods, together with the standard one, have been implemented in a MATLAB-based integrated graphical user interface software named Mcalibrator2. This software can enhance the accuracy of vision experiments and enable more efficient display characterization procedures. The software is now available publicly for free.