Evaluating rank-order code performance using a biologically-derived retinal model

We propose a model of the primate retinal ganglion cell layout corresponding to the foveal-pit to test rank-order codes as a means of sensory information transmission in primate vision. We use the model for encoding images in rank-order. We observe that the model is functional only when the lateral inhibition technique is used to remove redundancy from the sampled data. Further, more than 80% of the input information can be decoded by the time only up to 10% of the ganglion cells of our model have fired their first spikes.