Handbook

“Attempts to construct computer models for the recognition and interpretation of arbitrary scenes have resulted in such poor performance, limited range of abilities and inflexibility that, were it not for the human existence proof, we may have been tempted long ago to conclude that high performance, general purpose vision is impossible.” (Barrow & Tannenbaum, 1971).

Although written over 40 years ago, the above statement is still pertinent and relevant today: while seemingly effortless, human visual perception is a complex achievement taking up 40% of the entire cortex. In this course, the problem of visual processing will be considered from ecological, physiological, philosophical, and computational perspectives. The general orientation of the course is a theoretical one but applied aspects such as the role of basic perceptual processes in disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, and the implications for the design of effective visual displays will be discussed as well.