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

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)

Anil Bharath, Ph.D. is reader in Image Analysis at Imperial College in London, where he received his Ph.D. in electrical and electronic engineering. He has published over 60 papers in the field of imaging, image analysis, and acoustics. Dr. Bharath initiated the Basic Technology Project "Reverse Engineering Human Visual Processes," which aims to create an engineering blueprint for a subset of processes in the human visual system.

Maria Petrou, Ph.D. is a professor of signal processing and the head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group at Imperial College in London. She has published more than 300 papers on topics in remote sensing, computer vision, machine learning, color analysis, medical signal and image processing, and other fields, and she is co-author of two books on image processing. Dr. Petrou is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, IEE, and IAPR, a senior member of IEEE, and a distinguished fellow of the British Machine Vision Association. She earned her Ph.D. at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK.