Image statistics

Decades of work has attempted to explain how the representation of visual information is transformed across stages of the cortical processing stream. In some cases, these transformations have been elucidated by insights into how the receptive field properties of individual neurons differ across areas. But the view provided by single neuron selectivity has struggled to explain the transformations occurring from early to mid-level cortex. An alternative, complementary approach is to study the representational geometry of neuronal populations. Though derived from individual neuronal selectivity,

…the statistical properties of natural images. Neurophysiology and fMRI studies have tested neural sensitivity to images altered to exhibit either typical or atypical statistics. A general finding is that visual cortical neurons respond more strongly to images with natural statistics, and that this can vary across the visual hierarchy. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved human-level performance in vision tasks and have been used as visual cortex models. However, CNN responses to images with altered s

…of surround suppression depends on the image statistics of the center and surround pattern. Namely, if the center and surround share similar statistics, the neural responses are more suppressed by the surround. This behavior has been connected to computational benefits suc