Principal Investigator Pawan Sinha
We have complemented our experimental investigations of the nature of information used for various recognition tasks, with theoretical proposals for how such information can be formally represented. We have developed two related representation schemes that encode images in such a way as to attain a significant measure of tolerance to changes caused by illumination variations, resolution reduction and noise. The approaches are biologically plausible and, in computational simulations, are found to improve recognition performance over that obtained with conventional strategies such as those involving Gabor wavelets. Furthermore, the schemes suggest interesting new ways of conceptualizing the transforms effected by early visual areas in the mammalian brain, and have begun guiding neuro-physiological investigations of novels kinds of receptive-field structures in the primate visual pathway.