title: From neural oscillations to variational problems in the visual cortex.
abstract: Aim of this study is to provide a formal link between connectionist neural models and variational psycophysical ones. We show that the solution of phase difference equation of weakly connected neural oscillators gamma-converges as the dimension of the grid tends to 0, to the gradient flow relative to the Mumford-Shah functional in a Riemannian space. The Riemannian metric is directly induced by the pattern of neural connections. Next, we embed the energy functional in the specific geometry of the functional space of the primary visual cortex, that is described in terms of a subRiemannian Heisenberg space. Namely, we introduce the Mumford-Shah functional with the Heisenberg metric and discuss the applicability of our main gamma-convergence result to subRiemannian spaces.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, Universitá degli Studi di Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, Bologna IT-40136, Italy. asarti@deis.unibo.it
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sarti
authors.forename: Giovanna
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Citti
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Manfredini
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001683:Biological Clocks / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*