While multiple studies investigate the properties of the earliest and final stages of visual information processing, the underlying transformations leading from simple edge detection to object recognition remain seemingly intractable. To tackle this problem, we take a step back and ask what mechanisms could lead to a successful figure-ground segmentation of a given image. We propose the following conceptual framework: (i) alternating steps of feature detection and feature pooling (grouping) in a hierarchical manner; (ii)...