A novel sparse coding model based on structural similarity

Understanding and modeling the function of the neurons and neural systems are primary goal of systems neuroscience. Sparse coding theory demonstrates that the neurons in primary visual cortex form a sparse representation of natural scenes in the viewpoint of statistics. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse coding model based on structural similarity (SS_SC) for natural image feature extraction. The advantage for our model is to be able to preserve structural information from a scene, which human visual perception is highly adapted for. Using the proposed sparse coding model, the validity of image feature extraction is testified. Furthermore, compared with standard sparse coding (SC) model, the experimental results show that the quality of reconstructed images obtained by our method outperforms the SC method.