Major Topics Covered

Due to the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of the course, the topics covered can be listed for different aspects of the course. But these topics are not to be covered in the following order, instead, they are intertwined in the course.

• physiology:
  • The single neurons: action potential, single neuron models;

  • The retina: optics, anatomy, receptors (cones and rods) and retina neurons (ganglion cells and others), sampling theory, receptive fields, and their linear model;

  • The striate cortex (V1): layers and cell types (simple, complex) response selectivities, tuning for orientation, motion direction, spatial frequency and phase temporal frequency, Gabor computational model;

  • The extrastriate (prestriate) cortical areas: hierarchical structures and pathways, P and M (temporal and parietal, or what and where) pathways, various extrastriate areas (V2, V4, MT, MST, IT, etc.), specialization in motion, color and object recognition;

• Functional

  • Color perception: receptors (L, M and S cones), trichromatic theory, color matching, comparisons - necessary condition for color vision, color space and different color systems, color opponency, color constancy and models;

  • Form perception: tuning for spatial frequency, theory of filter bank, hierarchy for visual object recognition in IT, computational models for pattern recognition;

  • Depth perception: depth cues, tuning for binocular disparity, depth based on binocular disparity, computational models;

  • Motion perception: tuning for motion velocity (direction and speed) in MT, tuning for complex motions (rotational, radial and spiral) in MST, theory of optic flow, computational models;

• Mathematical methods

  theory of linear time/space invariant systems, convolution, Fourier theory, spatial frequency filtering, theory of neural networks.