Author:
BALBOA ROSARIO M.,GRZYWACZ NORBERTO M.
Abstract
Lateral inhibition is one of the first and most
important stages of visual processing. There are at least
four theories related to information theory in the literature
for the role of early retinal lateral inhibition. They
are based on the spatial redundancy in natural images and
the advantage of removing this redundancy from the visual
code. Here, we contrast these theories with data from the
retina's outer plexiform layer. The horizontal cells'
lateral-inhibition extent displays a bell-shape behavior
as function of background luminance, whereas all the theories
show a fall as luminance increases. It is remarkable that
different theories predict the same luminance behavior,
explaining “half” of the biological data. We
argue that the main reason is how these theories deal with
photon-absorption noise. At dim light levels, for which
this noise is relatively large, large receptive fields
would increase the signal-to-noise ratio through averaging.
Unfortunately, such an increase at low luminance levels
may smooth out basic visual information of natural images.
To explain the biological behavior, we describe an alternate
hypothesis, which proposes that the role of early visual
lateral inhibition is to deal with noise without missing
relevant clues from the visual world, most prominently,
the occlusion boundaries between objects.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Sensory Systems,Physiology
Cited by
39 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献