Coco-Periph: Bridging the Gap Between Human and Machine Perception in the Periphery

Evaluating deep neural networks (DNNs) as models of human perception has given rich insights into both human visual processing and representational properties of DNNs. We extend this work by analyzing how well DNNs perform compared to humans when constrained by peripheral vision – which limits human performance on a variety of tasks, but also benefits the visual system significantly. We evaluate this by (1) modifying the texture tiling model (TTM), a well tested model of peripheral vision, to be more flexibly used with DNNs, (2) generating a large dataset which we call COCO-Periph that contains images transformed to capture the information available in human peripheral vision, and (3) comparing DNNs to humans at peripheral object detection using a psychophysics experiment. Our results show that common DNNs underperform at object detection compared to humans when simulating peripheral vision with TTM. Training on COCO-Periph begins to reduce the gap between human and DNN performance and leads to small increases in corruption robustness, but DNNs still struggle to capture human-like sensitivity to peripheral clutter. Our work brings us closer to accurately modeling human vision, and paves the way for DNNs to mimic and sometimes benefit from properties of human visual processing.