Local Analysis of Visual Motion
Published in:
The Visual Neurosciences
Eds. L M Chalupa and J S Werner
Chapter 109, pages 1616-1623, 2003.
© MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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. This chapter adopts the
philosophy that in order to understand visual motion processing in the
brain, one should understand the nature of the motion information
embedded in the visual world, and the fundamental issues that arise
when one attempts to extract that information (Marr, 1977). I develop
the most basic computational solution to the motion estimation
problem, and examine the qualitative relationship between aspects of
this solution and the properties of neurons in the motion pathway.
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