Local Analysis of Visual Motion

We inhabit an ever-changing environment, in which sensing, processing and acting upon these changes can be essential for survival. When we move or when objects in the world move, the visual images projected onto each of our retinas change accordingly. The psychologist J. J. Gibson noted that important environmental information is embedded in this pattern of local retinal image velocities (Gibson, 1950), and thus initiated a scientific quest to understand the mechanisms that might serve to estimate and represent these velocities. Since that time, visual motion perception has been the subject of extensive research in perceptual psychology, visual neurophysiology, and computational theory.