How much can orientation selectivity and contrast gain control reduce redundancies in natural images.

Abstract

The two most prominent features of early visual processing are orientation selective filtering and contrast gain control. While the effect of orientation selectivity can be assessed within in a linear model, contrast gain control is an inherently nonlinear computation. Here we employ the class of Lp elliptically contoured distributions to investigate the extent to which the two features, orientation selectivity and contrast gain control, are suited to model the statistics of natural images. Within this model we find that contrast gain control can play a significant role for the removal of redundancies in natural images. Orientation selectivity, in contrast, has only a very limited potential for linear redundancy reduction.