Bayesian Self-Organization

Recent work by Becker and Hinton (Becker and Hinton, 1992) shows a promising mechanism, based on maximizing mutual information assuming spatial coherence, by which a system can selforganize itself to learn visual abilities such as binocular stereo. We introduce a more general criterion, based on Bayesian probability theory, and thereby demonstrate a connection to Bayesian theories of visual perception and to other organization principles for early vision (Atick and Redlich, 1990). Methods for implementation using variants of stochastic learning are described and, for the special case of linear filtering, we derive an analytic expression for the output. 1 Introduction The input intensity patterns received by the human visual system are typically complicated functions of the object surfaces and light sources in the world. It *Lei Xu was a research scholar in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University while this work was performed. Thus the visual system must be able to extract information from the input intensities that is relatively independent of the actual intensity values.