The Gabor function extracts the maximum information from input local signals.

The receptive fields of simple cells in the visual cortex are well approximated by Gabor functions. This paper shows that the Gabor functions are derived as solutions for a certain mutual-information maximization problem. This means that, under rather general assumptions, the Gabor function can extract the maximum information from input local signals. This suggests that the receptive fields of simple cells are optimally designed from an information theoretic viewpoint.