(Medical Xpress)—Visual perception is far more complex and powerful than our experience suggests. Moreover, in attempting to both understand vision and implement it in a computational device, the fact that a species' senses developed in concert with the ecological niche in which that species evolved. In our case, that means an evolutionary visual context consisting of natural objects, including mountains, rivers, trees, and other animals. Noting that neural representations of visual inputs are related to their statistical structure, and natural structures display an inseparable size hierarchy indicative of scale invariance, and scale invariance also occurs near a critical point in wide range of physical systems including ferromagnetic), researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California-San Diego recently demonstrated what their paper describes as "a unique approach to studying natural images by decomposing images into a hierarchy of layers at different logarithmic intensity scales and mapping them to a quasi-2D magnet."
↧