Vision Coding and Efficiency [Paperback]

Professor Colin Blakemore presents a fascinating insight to all the major topics in visual science research.Essays on all aspects of vision, approached from the perspective of coding and efficiency, examine the broad spectrum of vision research from one unifying viewpoint, namely the way that visual systems efficiently encode and represent the outside world.Essays on all aspects of vision, approached from the perspective of coding and efficiency, examine the broad spectrum of vision research from one unifying viewpoint, namely the way that visual systems efficiently encode and represent the outside world.This is an extensive collection of essays on all aspects of vision, approached from the perspective of coding and efficiency. It examines the broad spectrum of vision research from one particular, unifying viewpoint, namely the way that visual systems efficiently encode and represent the outside world. This approach, both rigorous and general, was championed by H.B. Barlow in the fifties and has been followed in many areas of vision research. The approach has recently acquired new significance due to the growing interest of computer science and artificial intelligence in the processes of vision, which attempts to describe visual processes in algorithmic terms, equally relevant to a robotic visual system, the eye of a fly or the complex visual pathways in the human brain.Part I. Concepts of Coding and Efficiency: 1. The quantum efficiency of vision; 2. Coding efficiency and visual processing; 3. Statistical limits to image understanding; 4. The theory of comparative eye design; Part II. Efficiency of the Visual Pathway: 5. The design of compound eyes; 6. The light response of photoreceptors; 7. Is there more than meets the eye?; 8. Quantum efficiency and performance of retinal ganglion cells; 9. Neural interactions underlying direction-selectivity in the rabbit retina; 10. Detection and discrimination mechansims in the striate cortex of the Old-World monkey; Part l³­