Abstract：The orientation sensitivity of human visual pathway plays a key role in contour perception, and this feature provides vital information for image understanding. In this paper, a new method of image edge detection based on visual direction sensitive mechanism was proposed. Using the physical structure feature of ganglion cells and LGN neurons receptive field distributing centripetal, a subcortex multidirection sensitive function layer was constructed to transform visual incentive to pulse sequence, and neural spiking information were fused to get an edge sensitive image; then a primary visual cortex function layer with removing optical direction receptive field was built to code on the spike sequence generated by the former layer according to first spike time. The edge detection result was obtained through lateral inhibition and threshold processing. In this paper, colony images with fuzzy hierarchy and rich details were taken for processing. The results of hierarchical edge detection were assessed by the confidence of edge, reconstruction similarity and weighted sum of them. It was proved that our method can completely detect image edge and effectively filter out texture noise. And the mean value of weighted sum index was 0.7468, significantly higher than other methods compared. The new method of edge detection proposed in the paper provides a new idea for the image processing and understanding based on orientation sensitivity of visual pathway.
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