Populations of neurons in inferotemporal cortex (IT) maintain an explicit
code for object identity that also tolerates transformations of object
appearance e.g., position, scale, viewing angle [1, 2, 3]. Though the learning
rules are not known, recent results [4, 5, 6] suggest the operation of an
unsupervised temporal-association-based method e.g., Foldiak's trace rule [7].
Such methods exploit the temporal continuity of the visual world by assuming
that visual experience over short timescales will tend to have invariant
identity content. Thus, by associating representations of frames from nearby
times, a representation that tolerates whatever transformations occurred in the
video may be achieved. Many previous studies verified that such rules can work
in simple situations without background clutter, but the presence of visual
clutter has remained problematic for this approach. Here we show that temporal
association based on large class-specific filters (templates) avoids the
problem of clutter. Our system learns in an unsupervised way from natural
videos gathered from the internet, and is able to perform a difficult
unconstrained face recognition task on natural images: Labeled Faces in the
Wild [8]