Understanding Natural Vision

Because many of you may not be familiar with the biological structures with which we ourselves process images, I shall start with a brief anatomical tour of the complex and incompletely understood visual system of primates. The biological components which perform the computations may also be unfamiliar, and it is interesting to compare them with physical devices: synapses and neurones are very slow and have a very limited dynamic range, but they are packed at a very high density per unit volume, are very freely interconnected over limited distances, and these interconnections possess self-regulatory properties that can compensate for errors in construction or changes of use.

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