Biologically-inspired characterization of sparseness in natural images

Abstract

Natural images follow statistics inherited by the structure of our physical (visual) environment. In particular, a prominent facet of this structure is that images can be described by a relatively sparse number of features. We designed a sparse coding algorithm biologically-inspired by the architecture of the primary visual cortex. We show here that coefficients of this representation exhibit a power-law distribution. For each image, the exponent of this distribution characterizes sparseness and varies from image to image. To investigate the role of this sparseness, we designed a new class of random textured stimuli with a controlled sparseness value inspired by measurements of natural images. Then, we provide with a method to synthesize random textures images with a given sparseness statistics that match that of some class of natural images and provide perspectives for their use in neurophysiology.

Publication
2016 6th European Workshop on Visual Information Processing (EUVIP)
Laurent U Perrinet
Laurent U Perrinet
Researcher in Computational Neuroscience

My research interests include Machine Learning and computational neuroscience applied to Vision.