The Cortical V1 Transform as a Heterogeneous Poisson Problem

SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 389-414, March 2024.
Abstract. Receptive profiles of the primary visual cortex (V1) cortical cells are very heterogeneous and act by differentiating the stimulus image as operators changing from point to point. In this paper we aim to show that the distribution of cells in V1, although not complete to reconstruct the original image, is sufficient to reconstruct the perceived image with subjective constancy. We show that a color constancy image can be reconstructed as the solution of the associated inverse problem, which is a Poisson equation with heterogeneous differential operators. At the neural level the weights of short-range connectivity constitute the fundamental solution of the Poisson problem adapted point by point. A first demonstration of convergence of the result towards homogeneous reconstructions is proposed by means of homogenization techniques.