Natural scenes | Information processing in biological systems

The efficient coding hypothesis states that sensory neural systems invest resources, such as energy, cells, and neural ‘wiring,’ in proportion to the expected gain of information that can be extracted from the environment. The predictions of this hypothesis can be calculated if we know the distributions of naturalistic signals that the neural system has to detect, encode, transmit and process. According to the hypothesis, our visual systems would presumably be different if they were adapted to a world containing random uncorrelated stimuli, rather than to the world populated with 3D objects that on our retinas create images full of edges, corners and texture. An example image from the Penn Natural Image database. We study statistical structure in natural scenes and ask if evolution has shaped our visual processing pathways to efficiently extract information from natural (but not synthetic random) stimuli. To make quantitative predictions, we therefore study the statistics of natural sc

The efficient coding hypothesis states that sensory neural systems invest resources, such as energy, cells, and neural ‘wiring,’ in proportion to the expected gain of information that can be extracted from the environment. The predictions of this hypothesis can be calculated if we know the distributions of naturalistic signals that the neural system has to detect, encode, transmit and process. According to the hypothesis, our visual systems would presumably be different if they were adapted to a world containing random uncorrelated stimuli, rather than to the world populated with 3D objects th

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