The statistics of natural images

Abstract

AbstracL Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the properties of natural images. Their statistics are important not only in image compression but also far the study of sensory processing in biology, which can be viewed as satisfying cettain ‘design criteria’. This review summarizes previous work on image statistics and presents our own data Perhaps the most notable property of natural images is an invariance to scale. We present data to support this claim as well 35 evidence for a hierarchical invariance in natural scenes. These symmetries provide a powerful description of natunl images as they g ~ d y resttiit the class of allowed d i s Vib ut ions. 1.