Page "Structural information theory" Paragraph 15

In SIT, candidate interpretations of a stimulus are represented by symbol strings, in which identical symbols refer to identical perceptual primitives ( e. g., blobs or edges ).

Every substring of such a string represents a spatially contiguous part of an interpretation, so that the entire string can be read as a reconstruction recipe for the interpretation and, thereby, for the stimulus.

These strings then are encoded ( i. e., they are searched for visual regularities ) to find the interpretation with the simplest code.