Two-dimensional Gabor-type receptive field as derived by mutual information maximization

Two-dimensional receptive fields are investigated from an information theoretic viewpoint. It is known that the spatially localized and orientation- and spatial-frequency-tuned receptive fields of simple cells in the visual cortex are well described by Gabor functions. This paper shows that the Gabor functions are derived as solutions for a certain mutual-information maximization problem. This means that, in a low signal-to-noise ratio limit, the Gabor-type receptive field can extract the maximum information from input local images with regard to their categories. Accordingly, this suggests that the receptive fields of simple cells are optimally designed from an information theoretic viewpoint. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.