VS298: Natural Scene Statistics

This seminar will examine what is known about the statistical structure of natural visual and auditory scenes, and theories of how sensory coding strategies have been adapted to this structure. Topics include:

• Theories of efficient and robust coding
• ICA and sparse coding
• Energy-based models: 'Product of experts' and 'Fields of experts'
• Learning invariant representations through ‘slow feature analysis’
• Manifold and Lie group models
• Hierarchical models and ‘deep networks’

Instructor: Bruno Olshausen

Enrollment information:

VS 298 (section 4), 2 units
CCN: 66489

Meeting time and place:

Monday 6-8, Evans 560

Schedule:

Date	Topic/Reading	Presenter
Feb. 3	Redundancy reduction, whitening, and power spectrum of natural images Barlow: Theory of redundancy reduction paper Atick: Theory of whitening paper Field: 1/f2 power spectrum and sparse coding paper	Anthony DiFranco Dylan Paiton Michael Levy
Feb. 10	Whitening in time and color; Robust coding Dong & Atick: spatiotemporal power spectrum of natural movies Ruderman: statistics of cone responses Karklin & Simoncelli: noisy population coding of natural images
Feb. 17	** Holiday **
Feb. 24	ICA and sparse coding
March 3	Statistics of natural sound and auditory coding
March 10	Higher-order group structure
March 17
March 24
March 31	** Spring recess **
April 7
April 14
April 21
April 28
May 5
May 12