Next Generation Artificial Vision Systems: Reverse Engineering the Human Visual System (Repost)

In addressing the topic of reverse-engineering the human visual system for technological applications, Bharath (image analysis, Imperial College London, UK) and Petrou (signal processing, Imperial College London, UK), together with an interdisciplinary team of contributing authors, address the topic in separate sections from the perspectives of physiology and cognitive psychology, software engineering, and hardware engineering. With respect to physiology and cognitive psychology, they offer chapters on the physiology/psychology of vision, dynamical modeling of the retina, the functional organization of receptive field characteristics of the cells in V1 (the primary visual cortex), and psychophysical experiments for probing models of V1 processing and visual attention. Software engineering topics include modeling V1 as a spatial frequency analyzer, the mathematics of image processing with irregularly sampled data, the relationship between super-resolution techniques and the eye movements known as tremor and microsaccades, eye vergence and depth perception as they pertain to a robotic assisted surgery application, and motion detection algorithms. And finally hardware is addressed in chapters on polymer sensors for imitating the spectral response characteristics of the human retina, hybrid chips that combine organic (polymer) sensors and analog circuitry, models of very large scale integrated analog circuits for implementing classical simple cell V1 receptive fields, implementation of previously discussed algorithms in digital hardware, and aspects of pre-attentive vision in terms of spatial and temporal saliency created by motion. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)