14,685 research outputs found
Adaptive Filtering Enhances Information Transmission in Visual Cortex
Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain encodes natural
environments. However, neural coding has largely been studied using simplified
stimuli. In order to assess whether the brain's coding strategy depend on the
stimulus ensemble, we apply a new information-theoretic method that allows
unbiased calculation of neural filters (receptive fields) from responses to
natural scenes or other complex signals with strong multipoint correlations. In
the cat primary visual cortex we compare responses to natural inputs with those
to noise inputs matched for luminance and contrast. We find that neural filters
adaptively change with the input ensemble so as to increase the information
carried by the neural response about the filtered stimulus. Adaptation affects
the spatial frequency composition of the filter, enhancing sensitivity to
under-represented frequencies in agreement with optimal encoding arguments.
Adaptation occurs over 40 s to many minutes, longer than most previously
reported forms of adaptation.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, includes supplementary informatio
A Generative Model of Natural Texture Surrogates
Natural images can be viewed as patchworks of different textures, where the
local image statistics is roughly stationary within a small neighborhood but
otherwise varies from region to region. In order to model this variability, we
first applied the parametric texture algorithm of Portilla and Simoncelli to
image patches of 64X64 pixels in a large database of natural images such that
each image patch is then described by 655 texture parameters which specify
certain statistics, such as variances and covariances of wavelet coefficients
or coefficient magnitudes within that patch.
To model the statistics of these texture parameters, we then developed
suitable nonlinear transformations of the parameters that allowed us to fit
their joint statistics with a multivariate Gaussian distribution. We find that
the first 200 principal components contain more than 99% of the variance and
are sufficient to generate textures that are perceptually extremely close to
those generated with all 655 components. We demonstrate the usefulness of the
model in several ways: (1) We sample ensembles of texture patches that can be
directly compared to samples of patches from the natural image database and can
to a high degree reproduce their perceptual appearance. (2) We further
developed an image compression algorithm which generates surprisingly accurate
images at bit rates as low as 0.14 bits/pixel. Finally, (3) We demonstrate how
our approach can be used for an efficient and objective evaluation of samples
generated with probabilistic models of natural images.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure
Constraining uncertainty in aerosol direct forcing
The uncertainty in present-day anthropogenic forcing is dominated by uncertainty in the strength of the contribution from aerosol. Much of the uncertainty in the direct aerosol forcing can be attributed to uncertainty in the anthropogenic fraction of aerosol in the present-day atmosphere, due to a lack of historical observations. Here we present a robust relationship between total present-day aerosol optical depth and the anthropogenic contribution across three multi-model ensembles and a large single-model perturbed parameter ensemble. Using observations of aerosol optical depth, we determine a reduced likely range of the anthropogenic component and hence a reduced uncertainty in the direct forcing of aerosol
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