Bruno Olshausen
Bruno Adolphus Olshausen is an American neuroscientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on computational neuroscience, vision science, and sparse coding.
He currently serves as a Professor in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the UC Berkeley School of Optometry, with an affiliated appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
He is also the Director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
He earned his Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1994.
After completing his doctoral studies, he held postdoctoral positions at Department of Psychology, Cornell University and Center for Biological and Computational Learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2009, he was awarded Fellowship of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Fellowship of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program.
His academic appointments include: Olshausen's research focuses on understanding the information processing strategies employed by the visual system for tasks such as object recognition and scene analysis.
His approach combines studying neural response properties with mathematical modeling to develop functional theories of vision.
This work aims to both advance understanding of brain function and develop new algorithms for image analysis based on biological principles.
He has also contributed to technological applications, including image and signal processing, alternatives to backpropagation for unsupervised learning, memory storage and computation, analog data compression systems, etc.
One of Olshausen's most significant contributions is demonstrating how the principle of sparse coding can explain response properties of neurons in visual cortex.
Field showed how simple cells in the V1 cortex receptive field properties could emerge from learning a sparse code for natural images.
[3] This paper is based on two previous reports that gave additional technical details.
[4][5] The paper argued that simple cells have Gabor-like, localized, oriented, and bandpass receptive fields.
Previous methods, such as generalized Hebbian algorithm, obtains Fourier-like receptive fields that are not localized or oriented.
An image can be approximately represented as a linear sum of the receptive fields:
Minimizing the first term leads to accurate image reconstruction, and minimizing the second term leads to sparse linear coefficients, that is, a vector
Based on the 1996 paper, he worked out a theory that the Gabor filters appearing in the V1 cortex performs sparse coding with overcomplete basis set, such that it is optimal for images occurring in the natural habitat of humans.
