Receptive Fields for Vision: from Hyperacuity to Object Recognition

Abstract

Many of the lower-level areas in the mammalian visual system are organized retinotopically, that is, as maps which preserve to a certain degree the topography of the retina. A unit that is a part of such a retinotopic map normally responds selectively to stimulation in a well-delimited part of the visual field, referred to as its receptive field (RF). Receptive fields are probably the most prominent and ubiquitous computational mechanism employed by biological information processing systems. This paper surveys some of the possible computational reasons behind the ubiquity of RFs, by discussing examples of RF-based solutions to problems in vision, from spatial acuity, through sensory coding, to object recognition.