Identification of band-pass filtered letters and faces by human and ideal observers

To better understand how the visual system makes use of information across spatial scales when identifying different kinds of complex patterns, we measured human and ideal contrast identification thresholds to estimate identification efficiency for 1- and 2-octave wide band-pass filtered letters and faces embedded in 2-D dynamic Gaussian noise. Varying stimulus center frequency from 1 to 70 c/object had different effects on letter and face …