期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2004
卷号：101
期号：43
页码：15524-15529
DOI：10.1073/pnas.0406664101
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Although our visual system is extremely good at extracting objects from the visual scene, this process involves complicated computations that are thought to require image processing by many successive cortical areas. Thus, intermediate stages in object extraction should not eliminate essential properties of the objects that are still required by later stages. A particularly important characteristic of an object is its shape, and shape has the property that it is unchanged by translations, rotations, and magnifications of the image. I show that the requirement for this property of shape to be preserved in the image, as represented by the firing of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1), is equivalent to a particular type of computation, known as a wavelet transform, determining the firing rate of V1 neurons in response to an image on the retina. Experimental data support the conclusion that the neural representation of images in V1 is described by a wavelet transform and, therefore, that the properties of shape are preserved.
