Activity bubbles and natural image sequences

Abstract. Recently, different models of the statistical structure of natural images have been proposed. Maximizing sparseness, or alternatively temporal coherence of linear filter outputs leads to the emergence of simple cell properties. Taking account of the basic dependencies of linear filter outputs enables modelling of complex cell and topographic properties as well. In this paper, I propose a unifying framework for all these statistical properties, based on the concept of spatio-temporal activity bubbles.