Vision: The World through Picket Fences

Vision: The World through Picket Fences

Our visual system must allow us to see the form of objects in motion. Tracking objects of interest stabilises their images on the retina, but is not sufficient, as untracked images move on the retina. This problem is solved by cells tuned in both space and time, combining information about form with information about motion.

Nervous picket fences

omplex nervous system patterning—usually assumed to have coevolved with advanced, centralized nervous systems— may have arisen before nerves consolidated into a central nerve chord, according to Christopher Lowe, John Gerhart (University of California, Berkeley, CA), Marc Kirschner (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA), and colleagues. Their idea runs counter to the prevailing theory of dorsoven...

Book Reviews: Black Picket Fences, and Voices from Beneath the Veil

Sparkle Vision : Seeing the World through Random

This thesis studies the problem of reproducing the world lighting from a single image of an object covered with random specular microfacets on the surface. Such a reflector can be interpreted as a randomized mapping from the lighting to the image. This intrinsic randomness makes it challenging for humans to interpret the image of a specular surface. We propose a system to solve it algorithmical...

Situating vision in the world.

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in what has been called 'situated cognition', which has included claims that certain forms of representation are inadequate for modeling active organisms or agents such as humans and robots. In this article, I suggest that a weakness in classical theories of visual representation is the way in which representations connect with the real world, w...