TR on representation with receptive fields available

[Edelman Shimon]

The following TR is available via anonymous ftp from
eris.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il (132.76.80.53), as /pub/rfs-for-recog.ps.Z

Representation with receptive fields: gearing up for recognition

Weizmann Institute CS-TR 93-09

Yair Weiss and Shimon Edelman

Abstract:

  Receptive fields are probably the most prominent and ubiquitous
  computational mechanism employed by biological information
  processing systems.  We report an attempt to understand the
  representational capabilities of the kind of receptive fields found
  in mammalian vision motivated by the assumption that the successive
  stages of processing remap the retinal representation space in a
  manner that makes objectively similar stimuli (e.g., different views
  of the same 3D object) closer to each other, and dissimilar stimuli
  farther apart. We present theoretical analysis and computational
  experiments that compare the similarity between stimuli as they are
  represented at the successive levels of the processing hierarchy,
  from the retina to the nonlinear cortical units. Our results
  indicate that population-based codes do convey information that
  seems lost in the activities of the individual receptive fields, and
  that at the higher levels of the hierarchy objects may be
  represented in a form that is more useful for visual recognition.
  This finding may, therefore, explain the success of previous
  empirical approaches to object recognition that employed
  representation by localized receptive fields.