Background It has been shown that the classical receptive fields of simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex emerge from the statistical properties of natural images by forcing the cell responses to be maximally sparse or independent. We investigate how to learn features beyond the primary visual cortex from the statistical properties of modelled complex-cell outputs. In previous work, we showed that a new model, non-negative sparse coding, led to the emergence of features which code for contours of a given spatial frequency band. Results We applied ordinary independent component analysis to modelled outputs of complex cells that span different frequency bands. The analysis led to the emergence of features which pool spatially coherent across-frequency activity in the modelled primary visual cortex. Thus, the statistically optimal way of processing complex-cell outputs abandons separate frequency channels, while preserving and even enhancing orientation tuning and spatial localization. As a technical aside, we found that the non-negativity constraint is not necessary: ordinary independent component analysis produces essentially the same results as our previous work. Conclusion We propose that the pooling that emerges allows the features to code for realistic low-level image features related to step edges. Further, the results prove the viability of statistical modelling of natural images as a framework that produces quantitative predictions of visual processing.
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