Previous biological models of object recognition in cortex have been evaluated using idealized scenes and have hard-coded features, such as the HMAX model by Riesenhuber and Poggio [10]. Because HMAX uses the same set of features for all object classes, it does not perform well in the task of detecting a target object in clutter. This thesis presents a new model that integrates learning of object-specific features with the HMAX. The new model performs better than the standard HMAX and comparably to a computer vision system on face detection. Results from experimenting with unsupervised learning of features and the use of a biologically-plausible classifier are presented.
