# A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17254 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17254/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
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- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [Deep Predictive Coding Networks for Video Prediction and Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08104/) (2016)
- [MambaOut: Do We Really Need Mamba for Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07992/) (2024)
- [ViT-CoMer: Vision Transformer with Convolutional Multi-scale Feature Interaction for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07392/) (2024)
- [Neither hype nor gloom do DNNs justice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05355/) (2023)
- [Visual cognition in multimodal large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16093/) (2023)
- [EDTER: Edge Detection with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08566/) (2022)
- [Grounding Visual Illusions in Language: Do Vision-Language Models Perceive Illusions Like Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00047/) (2023)
- [Occlusion-Aware Instance Segmentation via BiLayer Network Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04438/) (2022)
- [Underwater Object Classification and Detection: first results and open challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00977/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.