INDEPENDENT COMPONENTS OF OPTICAL FLOWS HAVE MSTd-LIKE RECEPTIVE FIELDS

Ki-Young Park, Marwan Jabri, Soo-Young Lee, Terrence J. Sejnowski

We describe in this paper the properties of independent components of optical flow of moving objects. Video sequences of objects seen by an observer moving at various angles, directions and distances are used to produce optical flow maps. These maps are then processed using independent component analysis which yields filters that resemble the receptive fields of dorsal medial superior temporal cells of the primate brain. Contraction, expansion, rotation and translation receptive fields have been identified. Our results support Barlow's sensory coding theory and is in-line with other work that dealt with the independent components of image and video intensities.