Encoding of 3D surface priors in the spatial pattern of in- teraction among V1 disparity neurons

Our perceptual systems are shaped by our natural environment. Statistical studies on natural scenes have provided important insights to the development of simple cell receptive fields ? and the connectivity among orientation selective neurons in the primary visual cortex 1,25, 28. Here, we extended such study to the neural encoding of statistical regularities of 3D surfaces in natural scenes. Analysis of 3D range data of natural scenes suggests the correlation of binocular disparity at two spatial locations is a function of the relative spatial orientation between these locations: stronger correlation for cardinal orientations than for non-cardinal orientations. This cardinal preference arises from the prevalence of upright or horizontal objects in natural scenes. We investigated the implications of this statistical regularity in the neuronal connectivity in the primary visual cortex. We showed that this statistical regularity is encoded in the pairwise connectivity between disparity neurons in V1, and can potentially serve as a surface prior in 3D perceptual inference.