Development of a Biologically Inspired Real-Time Visual Attention System
BMVC '00 Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Biologically Motivated Computer Vision
Formation of Direction Selectivity in Natural Scene Environments
Neural Computation
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The receptive fields of neurons in the mammalian primary visual cortex are oriented not only in the domain of space, but in most cases, also in the domain of space-time. While the orientation of a receptive field in space determines the selectivity of the neuron to image structures at a particular orientation, a receptive fieldUs orientation in space-time characterizes important additional properties such as velocity and direction selectivity. Previous studies have focused on explaining the spatial receptive field properties of visual neurons by relating them to the statistical structure of static natural images. In this report, we examine the possibility that the distinctive spatiotemporal properties of visual cortical neurons can be understood in terms of a statistically efficient strategy for encoding natural time varying images. We describe an artificial neural network that attempts to accurately reconstruct its spatiotemporal input data while simultaneously reducing the statistical dependencies between its outputs. The network utilizes spatiotemporally summating neurons and learns efficient sparse distributed representations of its spatiotemporal input stream by using recurrent lateral inhibition and a simple threshold nonlinearity for rectification of neural responses. When exposed to natural time varying images, neurons in a simulated network developed localized receptive fields oriented in both space and space-time, similar to the receptive fields of neurons in the primary visual cortex.