Efficient coding in the whisker system: Biomimetic pre-processing for robots?

Abstract

Introduction. The Efficient coding hypothesis [1, 2] proposes that biological sensory processing has evolved to maximize the information transmitted to the brain from the environment, and should therefore be tuned to the statistics of the world. Metabolic and wiring considerations impose additional sparsity on these representations, such that the activity of individual neurons are as decorrelated as possible [3]. Efficient coding has provided a framework for understanding early sensory processing in both vision and audition, for example in explaining the receptive field properties of simple and complex cells in primary visual cortex (V1) and the tuning properties of auditory nerve fibres [4]. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.