multi-channel M-scaled discrete filter convolution

Okay, so, I built this really neat discrete filter-based visual field model, planning to use it to measure binocular image statistics and to generate more realistic rivalry simulations. I hoped that doing the simulations would actually be quicker using the filters, since there would be far fewer filters than pixel images (I was using image-filter convolution to do the simulations I showed 2 posts ago), and the filters only needed to be represented by their scalar responses. Hoped but did not believe..

So now, I just spent the weekend (wrote that first paragraph a week ago) staring at the code, trying to figure out how to do, essentially, convolution of a function with an irregular array. It is complicated! I wrote a function to get local neighborhood vectors for each filter within its own channel, and then stared at that for a couple of days, and then realized that I should have written it to get the neighborhood without regard to channel. It's a pretty gangly operation, but it does have a good structural resemblance to stuff I've been thinking about for years. Ed and Bruce's relatively abstract idea about the broadband gain control pools, well, I've built it. Not for the intended purposes, since there's not going to be any gain control here - the only suppression that will be involved is like an 'exit gate', the permission for information in the channel array to be moved out to the later stages ("consciousness", we'll call it).

And, I say again, it's complicated. It's definitely not going to be faster than the rectangular filter convolution; in fact, it's likely to be 3 or 4 times slower, and it's going to produce rougher looking images on top of that. All this just to incorporate stupid M-scaling into these stupid rivalry waves. I swear, I can't think of a better way to do it. And the thing still isn't going to know anything about surfaces or faces or houses or any of that stuff, and it's going to take forever to debug and proof since it's going to be so slow...

But it's going to be cool.