Single vs. population cell coding: Gaze movement control in target search

Gaze movement plays an important role in human visual search system. In literature, the winner-take-all method is wildly used to simulate the controlling of the gaze movement. The winner-take-all is a type of single-cell coding method, which uses one cell (grandmother cell) or one response to represent an object. However, eye movement is affected by the visual context which includes more than one object in images, especially in target search. Therefore, we propose to use the population coding with more than one response rather than the single-cell coding on gaze movement control. The proposed method is supported by the theoretical analysis and experiments on a real image database which show the population-cell-coding improves the target locating accuracy by 44.4% only at the cost of coding 22.4% more information than that of single-cell-coding.