  The human visual system is composed of multiple physiological components that
apply multiple mechanisms in order to cope with the rich visual content it
encounters. The complexity of this system leads to non-trivial relations
between what we see and what we perceive, and in particular, between the raw
intensities of an image that we display and the ones we perceive where various
visual biases and illusions are introduced. In this paper we describe a method
for reducing a large class of biases related to the lateral inhibition
mechanism in the human retina where neurons suppress the activity of
neighboring receptors. Among these biases are the well-known Mach bands and
halos that appear around smooth and sharp image gradients as well as the
appearance of false contrasts between identical regions. The new method removes
these visual biases by computing an image that contains counter biases such
that when this laterally-compensated image is viewed on a display, the inserted
biases cancel the ones created in the retina.
