Selforganization by Evolutionary Strategies in Visual Systems

Pattern recognition usually distinguishes two fields in its systems, feature detection and classification. There is a certain similarity to vision in man where feature detection partly takes place in the retina while the process of assigning the features to the proper concepts is supposed to be located in the cortex. With respect to a certain set of pictures one may ask whether the features being detected are the most advantageous ones for the solution of the classification problem. Within the system of parallel distributed pattern recognition being developed at the Department for Bionics and Evolution Techniques a certain feature is given by a local filter which is described by its structure and by some parameters contained in the structure. The locally detected signals are added and the result is a global value of that particular feature. If the structure of the local filter is well defined there will be no problems with the determination of parameters by applying evolution strategy.