Assignment of Multiplicative Mixtures in Natural Images

In the analysis of natural images, Gaussian scale mixtures (GSM) have been used to account for the statistics of (cid:2)lter responses, and to inspire hi- erarchical cortical representational learning schemes. GSMs pose a crit- ical assignment problem, working out which (cid:2)lter responses were gen- erated by a common multiplicative factor. We present a new approach to solving this assignment problem through a probabilistic extension to the basic GSM, and show how to perform inference in the model using Gibbs sampling. We demonstrate the ef(cid:2)cacy of the approach on both synthetic and image data. Understanding the statistical structure of natural images is an important goal for visual neuroscience.