Certain aspects of the present disclosure present a technique for primary visual cortex (V1) cell training and operation. The present disclosure proposes a model structure of V1 cells and retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), and an efficient method of training connectivity between these two layers of cells such that the proposed method leads to an autonomous formation of feature detectors within the V1 layer. The proposed approach enables a hardware-efficient and biological-plausible implementation of image recognition and motion detection systems.