Higher-order structure in natural scenes

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Abstract
Real-world visual scenes display consistent first- and second-order statistical regularities to which visual neural representations may be perceptually matched, but these lower-order regularities stem from constraints on image power spectra, which appear to carry much less perceptual information than image phase spectra. Natural scenes are shown also to display consistent higher-order statistical regularities, and an analysis of these regularities in terms of fourth-order spectra shows that they are strongly dependent on spatial frequency. These findings have important consequences for the design of a visual system that aims to maximize sparseness in neural representations.