Relaxation network for Gabor image decomposition

The so-called "simple cells" in layer IV of feline primary visual cortex have been shown to have Gabor function spatial receptive field profiles (RFP's). Since Gabor functions are not mutually orthogonal, the decomposition of an image into Gabor function coefficients is usually performed by minimising some measure of the error between the original image and that reconstructed from the coefficients. A cortical relaxation model is proposed which performs this minimisation implicitly, and is used to examine the biological relevance and feasibility of reconstruction error minimisation.