John Wiley and Sons Ltd Adaptive Cooperative Systems (English, Ha...

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A co-operative process is one in which locally organized elements interact in a co-operative manner to achieve an overall, global order. Such processes are widespread in physical and biological systems - their elements may be pixels in a digital image, neurons in the central nervous system, or atoms in a solid lattice. In this work, the author presents a theory of co-operative computation, as applied to perceptual inferencing problems. The problems addressed include: the integration of multiple sensory information (multi-user fusion); figure-ground segregation; the segmentation of visual images; attention; the self-organization of feature detecting neurons; and short-term plasticity.