Abstract

Riesenhuber & Poggio recently proposed a model of object recognition in cortex which, beyond integrating general beliefs about the visual system in a quantitative framework, made testable predictions about visual processing. In particular, they showed that invariant object representation could be obtained with a selective pooling mechanism over properly chosen afferents through a MAX operation: For instance, at the complex cells level, pooling over a group of simple cells at the same preferred orientation and position in space but at slightly different spatial frequency would provide scale tolerance, while pooling over a group of simple cells at the same preferred orientation and spatial frequency but at slightly different position in space would provide position tolerance. Indirect support for such mechanisms in the visual system comes from the ability of the architecture at the top level to replicate shape tuning as well as shift and size invariance properties of “view-tuned cells ” (VTUs) found in inferotemporal cortex (IT), the highest area in the ventral visual stream, thought to be crucial in mediating object recognition in cortex. There is also now good physiological evidence that a MAX operation is performed at various levels along the ventral stream. However, in the original paper by Riesenhuber & Poggio, tuning and pooling parameters of model units in early and intermediate areas were only qualitatively inspired by physiological data. Many studies have investigated the tuning properties of simple and complex cells in primary visual cortex, V1. We show that

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