A model for the receptive field of retinal ganglion cells

Most retina ganglion cells have center–surround receptive fields, where the center may be either ON or OFF while the surround is the opposite. We clarify the functional roles of the receptive field structure, on the basis of the modern theory of natural data processing. It is suggested that the retina shares the principal mechanism and performance of image processing with a video codec in computers, where the antagonism in spatial or temporal receptive fields originates from the orthogonality condition between linear filters for optimal coding of visual signals. We also reveal what visual information is multiplexed across the discharges of an ensemble of ganglion cells. Our theory makes it possible to predict the cross-correlations between ganglion cell spikes, which are optimized for LGN cells to respond accurately and quickly to their receptive fields.