Statistics of Natural Images: Scaling in the Woods
@article{Ruderman1993StatisticsON, title={Statistics of Natural Images: Scaling in the Woods}, author={Daniel L. Ruderman and William Bialek}, journal={Physical review letters}, year={1993}, volume={73 6}, pages={ 814-817 } }
In order to best understand a visual system one should attempt to characterize the natural images it processes. We gather images from the woods and find that these scenes possess an ensemble scale invariance. Further, they are highly non-Gaussian, and this non-Gaussian character cannot be removed through local linear filtering. We find that including a simple "gain control" nonlinearity in the filtering process makes the filter output quite Gaussian, meaning information is maximized at fixed…
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