I'd like to understand the current concensus about the suitability of the 2D
Gabor function model of simple cell receptive fields, and I hope that someone
on this list can steer me in the right direction.
Marcelja (1980) and Daugman (1980, 1983) appear to have been among the first
to suggest that the receptive fields (RF) of cortical simple cells might be
well described by a Gabor function. Many results seem to be consistent with
this view, and many studies that I've read in psychophysics and visual
neuroscience make use of this general model. An impressive set of studies by
Jones and Palmer showed that a general 2D Gabor function can very closely
match the RF profile of simple cells (Jones and Palmer, 1987a, 1987b; Jones,
Stepnoski and Palmer, 1987). However, there have been dissenting views; for
example, Stork and Wilson (1990) argued that the Gabor function model is not
well supported. Daugman (1993) in turn argued that Stork and Wilson (1990),
and others, were in error.
I'd like to find out whether this argument has been resolved, and in which
direction. If it hasn't been resolved, which way are people leaning
currently?
Mike Hucka E-MAIL: michael.hucka@umich.edu
University of Michigan AI Lab WWW: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/hucka/
REFERENCES
Daugman, J. (1980) "Two-dimensional spectral analysis of cortical receptive
field profiles," Vis. Res. 20:847-856.
Daugman, J. (1983) "Six formal properties of two-dimensional anisotropic
visual filters: structural principles and frequency/orientation selectivity,"
IEEE Trans. Systems, Man, Cybernetics SMC-13(5):882-906.
Daugman, J. (1993) "Quadrature-phase simple cell pairs are appropriately
described in complex analytic form," J. Opt. Soc. Am A 10(2):375-377.
Jones, J.P., and Palmer, L.A. (1987a) "The two-dimensional spatial structure
of simple receptive fields in cat striate cortex," J. Neurophysiol.
58(6):1186-1211.
Jones, J.P., and Palmer, L.A. (1987b) "An evaluation of the two-dimensional
Gabor filter model of simple receptive fields in cat striate cortex," J.
Neurophysiol. 58(6):1233-1258.
Jones, J.P., Stepnoski, A., and Palmer, L.A. (1987) "The two-dimensional
spectral structure of simple receptive fields in cat striate cortex,"
J. Neurophysiol. 58(6):1212-1232.
Marcelja, S. (1980) "Mathematical description of the responses of simple
cortical cells," J. Opt. Soc. Am. 70(11):1297-1300.
Stork, D.G., and Wilson, H.R. (1990) "Do Gabor functions provide appropriate
descriptions of visual cortical receptive fields?" J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 7(8):
1362-1373.