This book provides a sound mathematical and technical perspective in functional and structural retina models, presents evaluation metrics to assess those models, and provides insights about the models hardware implementation.It begins by introducing the retina anatomy and its workings in a detailed way suitable for an engineering audience, while providing the mathematical analysis of the retina neural response. Moreover, it explores and establishes a framework for the comparison of retina models by organizing a set of metrics for testing and evaluating the different models.The book follows a signal processing perspective, where all models and metrics are discretized in order to be implemented and tested in a digital system, such as a computer or a specialized dedicated hardware device.

Development of the Visual System presents a selection of current studies that clearly illustrate principles of visual system development. These range from retinal development in fish and frogs to the effects of abnormal visual experience on the primary visual cortex of the cat. The book is unique in addressing four specific and fundamental aspects of development: cell lineage and cell fate, specificity and targeting of axons, specification of visual cortex, and correlates of the critical period. Encompassing technical advances in cellular and molecular biology and in video imaging and microscopy, contributions in each of these areas provide new information at the cellular and molecular levels to complement the now classic descriptions of visual development previously available at the level of neural systems.ContributorsKaren L. Allendoerfer, David M. Altshuler, Antonella Antonini, Seymour Benzer, Edward M. Callaway, Constance L. Cepko, Hollis T. Cline, Max S. Cynader, N. W. Daw, Scott E. Fraser, K. Fox, Eckhard Friauf, Anirvan Ghosh, R. W. Guillery, William A. Harris, Christine E. Holt, Lawrence C. Katz, Susan McConnell, Pamela A. Raymond, Thomas A. Reh, Carla J. Shatz, Michael P. Stryker, Claudia A. 0. Stuermer, Mriganka Sur, David L. Turner, T. N. Wiesel

The two volume set LNCS 4984 and LNCS 4985 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2007, held in Kitakyushu, Japan, in November 2007, jointly with BRAINIT 2007, the 4th International Conference on Brain-Inspired Information Technology. The 228 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous ordinary paper submissions and 15 special organized sessions. The 116 papers of the first volume are organized in topical sections on computational neuroscience, learning and memory, neural network models, supervised/unsupervised/reinforcement learning, statistical learning algorithms, optimization algorithms, novel algorithms, as well as motor control and vision. The second volume contains 112 contributions related to statistical and pattern recognition algorithms, neuromorphic hardware and implementations, robotics, data mining and knowledge discovery, real world applications, cognitive and hybrid intelligent systems, bioinformatics, neuroinformatics, brain-conputer interfaces, and novel approaches.

Motion processing is an essential piece of the complex brain machinery that allows us to reconstruct the 3D layout of objects in the environment, to break camouflage, to perform scene segmentation, to estimate the ego movement, and to control our action. Although motion perception and its neural basis have been a topic of intensive research and modeling the last two decades, recent experimental evidences have stressed the dynamical aspects of motion integration and segmentation. This book presents the most recent approaches that have changed our view of biological motion processing. These new experimental evidences call for new models emphasizing the collective dynamics of large population of neurons rather than the properties of separate individual filters. Chapters will stress how the dynamics of motion processing can be used as a general approach to understand the brain dynamics itself.