A historical perspective of algorithmic lateral inhibition and accumulative computation in computer vision

Certainly, one of the prominent ideas of Professor José Mira was that it is absolutelymandatory to specify the mechanisms and/or processes underlying each task and inference mentioned in an architecture in order to make operational that architecture. The conjecture of the last fifteen years of joint research has been that any bottom-up organizationmay bemade operational using two biologically inspiredmethods called ‘‘algorithmic lateral inhibition’’, a generalization of lateral inhibition anatomical circuits, and ‘‘accumulative computation’’, a working memory related to the temporal evolution of the membrane potential. This paper is dedicated to the computational formulation of both methods. Finally, all of the works of our group related to this methodological approximation are mentioned and summarized, showing that all of them support the validity of this approximation. & 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.