Retinotopic Mapping Enhances the Robustness of Convolutional Neural Networks

Foveated vision, a trait shared by many animals, including humans, has not been fully utilized in machine learning applications, despite its significant contributions to biological visual function. This study investigates whether retinotopic mapping, a critical component of foveated vision, can enhance image categorization and localization performance when integrated into deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Retinotopic mapping was integrated into the inputs of standard off-the-shelf convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which were then retrained on the ImageNet task. As expected, the logarithmic-polar mapping improved the network's ability to handle arbitrary image zooms and rotations, particularly for isolated objects. Surprisingly, the retinotopically mapped network achieved comparable performance in classification. Furthermore, the network demonstrated improved classification localization when the foveated center of the transform was shifted. This replicates a crucial ability of the human visual system that is absent in typical convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These findings suggest that retinotopic mapping may be fundamental to significant preattentive visual processes.