In this work, we have reformulated the selection of a few responding u
nits tuned to patterns of activity from the Fourier spectrum as a mult
ilayer system composed of four stages of different kinds of feature de
tectors. The system output is a sparse representation for images that
produces an organization according to object power discrimination. The
resultant multilayer system provides a more efficient representation
for later stages of processing because it possesses a higher degree of
perceptual independence among its outputs. (C) 1998 Pattern Recogniti
on Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.