Concept
Sparse coding
Representing information with few active elements at a time, rather than many slightly-active ones — cheap in energy and bandwidth, and apparently the strategy sensory systems settled on.
From the EE side
From the neuro side
If most of your channels are quiet most of the time, you can spend your power budget on the ones that are not. Sensory neurons appear to have worked this out well ahead of sensor designers.
Nearby concepts
All topics under Sparse coding
- Neuromorphic computing 1990 Building computation from analog devices in their physics-limited regimes and from spikes rather than clocked arithmetic, on the argument that the brain's efficiency comes from its style of computing.
- The silicon retina 1988 Analog VLSI built to copy the retina's habit of reporting change rather than absolute brightness, which is the ancestor of every event camera shipping today.
- Receptive fields in visual cortex 1962 Cortical cells respond not to spots of light but to oriented edges at particular positions, and to progressively more abstract features further along the pathway.
- Efficient coding 1961 The proposal that sensory systems are built to remove redundancy from their input, which turns "why is the retina wired this way" into an information-theory question.