Abstract
Because many of you may not be familiar with the biological structures with which we ourselves process images, I shall start with a brief anatomical tour of the complex and incompletely understood visual system of primates. The biological components which perform the computations may also be unfamiliar, and it is interesting to compare them with physical devices: synapses and neurones are very slow and have a very limited dynamic range, but they are packed at a very high density per unit volume, are very freely interconnected over limited distances, and these interconnections possess self-regulatory properties that can compensate for errors in construction or changes of use.
The problems facing physiologists or psychologists studying natural vision are also very different from yours. First, it is technically very difficult to monitor the activity of just one or two elements at a time in a structure that contains 1010 neurones or more; second, with such incomplete information it is hard to interpret the results, and third, there is the constant danger of interfering with normal function. Also, we often fail to understand the goal or purpose of the neuronal interactions that occur in a biological structure; this should not be a problem for physicists because I cannot imagine one of your devices ever doing something clever that it’s designer had not intended it to do!
The overall achievement of a good visual system is impressive. It does far more than simply provide us with a good picture to look at, for the looker is part of the system. It gives us most of our knowledge of the world, which requires organisation of the results to minimize redundant representation and statistical testing to ensure reliability. All this is done on the spot, in real time, by a system weighing about two kilograms (including power supplies). So far the flow of important concepts has been from physics to biology, but if we knew exactly how a real visual system worked the flow might be reversed.
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Barlow, H.B. (1983). Understanding Natural Vision. In: Braddick, O.J., Sleigh, A.C. (eds) Physical and Biological Processing of Images. Springer Series in Information Sciences, vol 11. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-68888-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-68888-1_1
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