A new nonconvex variational approach for sensory neurons receptive field estimation

6th International Workshop on New Computational Methods for Inverse Problems

物理学;计算机科学

Drogoul, A.^1 ; Aubert, G.^2 ; Cessac, B.^1 ; Kornprobst, P.^1

Inria, Biovision Team, Sophia Antipolis, France^1

Laboratoire J.A. Dieudonné, UMR 6621 CNRS, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France^2

关键词: Discrete energies;    Ground truth;    Receptive fields;    Retinal ganglion cells;    Sensory neurons;    Variational approaches;    Visual fields;    Visual sensory;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/756/1/012006/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/756/1/012006

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Determining the receptive field of a visual sensory neuron is crucial to characterize the region of the visual field and the stimuli this neuron is sensitive to. We propose a new method to estimate receptive fields by a nonconvex variational approach, thus relaxing the simplifying and unrealistic assumption of convexity made by standard approaches. The method consists of solving a relaxed discrete energy minimization problem using a proximal alternating algorithm. We compare our approach with the classical spike-triggered-average technique on simulated data, considering a typical retinal ganglion cell as ground truth. Results show a high improvement in terms of accuracy and convergence with respect to the duration of the experiment.