Is sparse and distributed the coding goal of simple cells?

Abstract. The question of why the receptive fields of simple cells in the primary visual cortex are Gabor-like is a crucial one in vision research. Many research efforts (Olshausen and Field 1996, 1997; van Hateren and Ruderman 1998; van Hateren and van der Schaaf 1998) that yield a set of localized, oriented, and bandpass Gabor-like receptive fields believe that sparse and distributed is the coding goal of simple cells. This paper investigates a more general coding strategy that measures equally any departure from normality in the simple cells' responses. That is, we investigate the possibility that highly kurtotic response histograms may result if simple cells explicitly seek, not maximally kurtotic, but rather maximally non-Gaussian response histograms to natural images. It is found that, under this coding strategy, the simulations produce a majority of localized, oriented, bandpass (Gabor-like) receptive fields. Some receptive fields, however, are spatially distributed and sho...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: BC
• Authors: Li Zhao
• Keywords: BC 2004, Receptive Fields, Response Histograms, Simple Cells