The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Several interesting observations about the Human Visual System have been investigated in recent years: 1. Sensory data is encoded in the visual cortex using color opponent space (luminance / chrominance space). 2. The distribution of RGB cones over the retina is non-uniform and highly biased towards the red/green cones. 3. The Human Visual System has high spatial sensitivity in the luminance band and low spatial sensitivity in the chrominance bands. These observations have been viewed as independent phenomena originating from different sources. In this talk we propose a novel view which unifies these phenomena and interpret them as a direct outcome of the statistical properties of color images. Unlike the current belief that the cortical representation stems from “efficient coding” that reduces data redundancies, this view proposes that the sensory setup as well as the cortical representation are outcome of “efficient reconstruction” where the goal is to maximize the information available from the limited amount of samples obtained by the retinoscopic sensors.