Emergence of Motion-in-depth Selectivity in the Visual Cortex through Linear Combination of Binocular Energy Complex Cells with Different Ocular Dominance

An architectural hypothesis for the origin of motion-in-depth selectivity in the visual cortex is proposed. On the basis of a time extension of the phase-based techniques for disparity estimation, we consider the computation of the total temporal derivative of the time-varying disparity through the combination of the responses of disparity energy units. The emergence of motion-in-depth tuning is pointed out in relation to the unbalanced ocular dominance of afferent binocular complex cells. The resulting cortical units of the model exhibit properties that can be directly compared with those reported in the literature for real cortical cells.