The Neurophysiology and Computational Mechanisms of Object Representation

A concise description of the representation of objects and faces provided by inferior temporal cortex neurons in the primate (macaque) brain is followed by new findings about how this representation operates in natural scenes and allows a number of objects and their relative spatial position in a scene to be encoded. Then a computational approach to how the object recognition processes described are performed in the primate brain is discussed as well as the types of strategy that the human brain uses to solve the enormous computational problem of invariant object recognition in complex natural scenes (Rolls 2008b; Rolls and Deco 2002; Rolls and Stringer 2006b). This contribution aims to provide a closely linked neurophysiological and computational approach to object recognition and categorization. Other approaches are represented in this volume and elsewhere (Biederman 1987; Fukushima 1989; Riesenhuber and Poggio 2000; Serre et al. 2007), and are compared with current approaches (Rolls 2008b; Rolls and Deco 2002; Rolls and Stringer 2006b).