Activity estimation via distributed measurements in an orientation sensitive neural fields model of the visual cortex

Abstract: This paper investigates the online estimation of neural activity within the primary visual cortex (V1) in the framework of observability theory. We focus on a low-dimensional neural fields modeling hypercolumnar activity to describe activity in V1. We utilize the average cortical activity over V1 as measurement. Our contributions include detailing the model's observability singularities and developing a hybrid high-gain observer that achieves, under specific excitation conditions, practical convergence while maintaining asymptotic convergence in cases of biological relevance. The study emphasizes the intrinsic link between the model's non-linear nature and its observability. We also present numerical experiments highlighting the different properties of the observer.