Biological Vision

Abstract

The most, some would say the only, successful vision systems are the biological ones, ranging in complexity from those found in lower animals to the very flexible and highly integrated system for human vision. Although it has not, in general, proved feasible to employ biological functions for technical systems, the situation may be quite different in the field of information processing. The computational structures which have been developed in our current computer technology are primarily designed to handle information in strings. This is very different from spatial and cognitive information, and it has been found that the current organization of computers does not support an efficient representation and computation for spatial data. For this reason it is of great interest to look at the organization of biological visual systems. The study of such systems may suggest more efficient information representations, computation structures and suitable primitives for representation of spatial information.