Representational Strategy in the Visual Cortex

Tai Sing Lee

Abstract: We generalized Daubechies' (see IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol.36, no.5, p.961-1004, 1990) results on 1D wavelets to 2D, and elucidated the conditions in which a family of Gabor wavelets will provide a complete representation of an image. We found that the phase space (scale, orientation, x, y) sampling density of the striate cortical simple cells is sufficiently dense to form a tight wavelet frame. This tight frame approximates the continuous wavelet transform, and its redundancy allows high resolution information to be represented in the low-resolution firings of the simple cells. We presented some experimental results to demonstrate this idea.<