  A class of specialized neurons, called lobula plate tangential cells (LPTCs)
has been shown to respond strongly to wide-field motion. The classic model,
elementary motion detector (EMD) and its improved model, two-quadrant detector
(TQD) have been proposed to simulate LPTCs. Although EMD and TQD can percept
background motion, their outputs are so cluttered that it is difficult to
discriminate actual motion direction of the background. In this paper, we
propose a max operation mechanism to model a newly-found transmedullary neuron
Tm9 whose physiological properties do not map onto EMD and TQD. This proposed
max operation mechanism is able to improve the detection performance of TQD in
cluttered background by filtering out irrelevant motion signals. We will
demonstrate the functionality of this proposed mechanism in wide-field motion
perception.
