Collaborative Research: CRCNS: Detection and Recognition of Objects in Visual Cortex

EIA-0218693 Poggio，TomasoMIT合作研究：CRCNS：视觉皮质中物体的检测和识别麻省理工学院的T.Poggio、西北大学的D.Ferster和加州理工大学的C.Koch正在探索和评估这样的假设，即视觉识别的皮质组织和神经机制可以通过建立在两个现有的识别和注意力计算模型上的连贯理论框架来解释，其次，对猴子和猫的生理学研究和视觉心理物理学的结合可以用来测试和完善这一理论。这项研究分为三个主要项目。麻省理工学院的这项工作是在识别的量化层次模型的指导下进行的，探索了识别和分类之间的关系，以及IT皮层神经机制的选择性和不变性的性质。西北大学的这项工作正在测试该模型的一个关键预测，该预测关于V1中复杂单元执行的池化操作(最大运算与线性和)的性质。这些实验是在麻醉的猫细胞内进行的，以允许表征潜在的电路和生物物理机制。最后，加州理工学院的研究工作正在扩展识别的基本模型，将其与基于显著的注意力模型相结合。这项工作的计算部分，以视觉识别量化模型的开发为中心，构成了加强研究人员之间互动的主要工具：该模型建议实验，并指导计划和解释新的实验。

EIA-0218693Poggio, TomasoMIT Collaborative Research: CRCNS: Detection and Recognition of Objects in Visual CortexA three way collaboration between the laboratories of Profs. T. Poggio at MIT, D. Ferster at Northwestern University and C. Koch at Caltech is exploring and evaluating the hypotheses that the cortical organization and the neural mechanisms of visual recognition can be explained by a coherent theoretical framework built on two existing computational models for recognition and attention and, secondly, that a combination of physiological work on monkeys and cats, together with visual psychophysics can be used to test and refine the theory. The research is organized into three main projects. The work at MIT is guided by a quantitative hierarchical model of recognition, probing the relations between identification and categorization and the properties of selectivity and invariance of the neural mechanisms in IT cortex. The work at Northwestern University is testing a key prediction of the model about the nature of the pooling operation (a max operation vs. a linear sum) performed by complex cells in V1. The experiments are done in the anesthetized cat, intracellularly, to allow for a characterization of the underlying circuit and biophysical mechanisms. Finally, work at Caltech is extending the basic model of recognition by integrating it with a saliency-based attentional model. The computational component of this work, centered around the development of a quantitative model of visual recognition, constitutes the primary tool to enforce interactions between the investigators: the model suggests experiments and guides planning and interpreting new experiments.