A Vision Architecture
  We are offering a particular interpretation (well within the range of experimentally and theoretically accepted notions) of neural connectivity and dynamics and discuss it as the data-and-process architecture of the visual system. In this interpretation the permanent connectivity of cortex is an overlay of well-structured networks, nets, which are formed on the slow time-scale of learning by self-interaction of the network under the influence of sensory input, and which are selectively activated on the fast perceptual time-scale. Nets serve as an explicit, hierarchically structured representation of visual structure in the various sub-modalities, as constraint networks favouring mutually consistent sets of latent variables and as projection mappings to deal with invariance. 
Christoph von der Malsburg
q-bio.NC