How does the visual system encode natural scenes? What are the basic structures of natural scenes? In current models of scene perception, there are two broad feature representations, global and local representations. Both representations are useful and have some successes; however, many observations on human scene perception seem to point to an intermediate-level representation.In this paper, we proposed natural scene structures, i.e., multi-scale spatial concatenations of local features, as an intermediate-level representation of natural scenes. To compile the natural scene structures, we first sampled a large number of multi-scale circular scene patches in a hexagonal configuration. We then performed independent component analysis on the patches and classified the independent components into a set of clusters using the K-means method. Finally, we obtained a set of natural scene structures, each of which is characterized by a set of dominant clusters of independent components.We examined a range of statistics of the natural scene structures, compiled from two widely used datasets of natural scenes, and modeled their spatial arrangements at larger spatial scales using adjacency matrices. We found that the natural scene structures include a full range of concatenations of visual features in natural scenes, and can be used to encode spatial information at various scales. We then selected a set of natural scene structures with high information, and used the occurring frequencies and the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrices to classify scenes in the datasets. We found that the performance of this model is comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art models on the two datasets. These results suggest that the natural scene structures are a useful intermediate-level representation of visual scenes for our understanding of natural scene perception.
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