Research Group

The research agenda of the Bethge Lab can be summarized by the two basic questions originally posed by Hermann von Helmholtz (1867, 1878): “What are the principles that govern how the visual pathways make inferences from the visual image? How do we use image information to compute these perceptual inferences?” A principal difficulty in the understanding of biological vision is the complexity of the inference problems we encounter both at the level of behavior as well as at the level of neuronal responses. This complexity mostly results from the large number of degrees of freedoms in the sensory input and in the neuronal responses. Using methods of statistical inference and learning theory, as well as signal processing, nonlinear dynamics and optimization theory, our research addresses the problem of perceptual inference from natural images and its neural basis at different level. Read more ...