Efficient Coding of Spatial Information in the Primate Retina

Abstract

Sensory neurons have been hypothesized to efficiently encode signals from the natural environment subject to resource constraints. The predictions of this efficient coding hypothesis regarding the spatial filtering properties of the visual system have been found consistent with human perception, but they have not been compared directly with neural responses. Here, we analyze the information that retinal ganglion cells transmit to the brain about the spatial information in natural images subject to three resource constraints: the number of retinal ganglion cells, their total response variances, and their total synaptic strengths. We derive a model that optimizes the transmitted information and compare it directly with measurements of complete functional connectivity between cone photoreceptors and the four major types of ganglion cells in the primate retina, obtained at single-cell resolution. We find that the ganglion cell population exhibited 80% efficiency in transmitting spatial information relative to the model. Both the retina and the model exhibited high redundancy (~30%) among ganglion cells of the same cell type. A novel and unique prediction of efficient coding, the relationships between projection patterns of individual cones to all ganglion cells, was consistent with the observed projection patterns in the retina. These results indicate a high level of efficiency with near-optimal redundancy in visual signaling by the retina.

Low-power low-area techniques for multichannel recording circuits dedicated to biomedical experiments

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“…There are many different biomedical experiments that involve using advanced electronics for recording biomedical signals [1][2][3][4]. These are mainly run to extract valuable information regarding human nervous system with a view to help people either by developing new medicines or artificial implants.…”

Bio-Inspired Vision-Based Leader-Follower Formation Flying in the Presence of Delays

“…The mechanism of object detection in biological systems is a non-trivial task and researchers are still in the process of decoding the neurological visual processes involved. Nevertheless, in [6,7,23], Baccus, Eizaburo, and Gollisch et al respectively argue that computations necessary for detecting object motion, distance, texture, and light are carried out in higher vertebrates' retinas before being passed to the brain for further processing. They argued that these functions are achieved by the photo-receptors using a combination of temporal filtering, threshold values and summing.…”

“…It is quite likely that, in order to meet this critical window, the computations to achieve flocking in natural systems happen in or close to the retina [7,8]. For example, it has been observed that direction, light, object, texture, distance and motion detection all take place in mammal's retinas and not the visual cortex [6,[8][9][10][11][12].…”