Abstract
Columnar architecture is a well established organizational principle for a variety of cortical systems. If two topographically mapped receptor systems, which receive slightly different “views” of the same physical stimulus, are interlaced as “columns”, then the difference map of the afferent inputs is coded within a spatial frequency channel of the resultant map. The difference map of the left and right retinal views of a three dimensensional scene contains cues for the binocular disparity of the objects in the scene. Physical objects which are located at a common distance from the observer will be represented by area's of difference mapping which possesss common cortical textural values. Thus, segmentation of the cortical representation of the visual scene by values of positional disparity may be accomplished by conventional monocular segmentation techniques, applied to the cortical representation.
The difference map is carried by a spatial frequency modulation determined by the period of the columnar interlacing. Ocular dominance columns in human striate cortex suggest a spatial frequency carrier which is roughly equal to the inverse of Panum's area. Since the difference mapping is a global attribute of the cortical representation, and is not contingent on the existence of labeled single cell feature extractors, the difference mapping algorithm represents a distinct alternative to conventional single cell approaches to feature extraction.
The difference mapping algorithm is briefly discussed in relation to other difference channels, such as color opponent segmentation and binocular orientation disparity. It is suggested that difference mapping may reflect a general synergistic mechanism relating topographic mapping and columnar architecture, which reduces the problem of feature extraction and segmentation for depth and color opponent channels to a single “textural” mechanism.
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Schwartz, E.L. Columnar architecture and computational anatomy in primate visual cortex: segmentation and feature extraction via spatial frequency coded difference mapping. Biol. Cybern. 42, 157–168 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00340072
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00340072