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Perhaps what distinguishes human intelligence from animal intelligence is that the human intelligence is not only used to improve one’s survival chances, but also to ponder on the big questions that have always bothered mankind: “Where do we come from?” “Why are we here?” “How do we function?”
Although these questions have been around as long as human life, it is only in the recent years that technology has advanced enough to allow scientists to make hypotheses and test for their predictions in the lab. The way the human visual system works is one of these fundamental questions. “How do we actually see?” The answer to this question has been the target of several decades of scientific endeavor by neurologists, physiologists and psychologists. And then the engineer inside each human comes into the scene, making human intelligence to race ahead of itself: human intelligence does not only ponder about the big questions, but as soon as it thinks of an answer, no matter how tentative, it wants to put it into practice. So, the simple question: “Why do birds fly?”, even when it was tentatively answered as “Because they have wings”, led to hundreds, if not thousands, of people replicating the wings of the birds and attempting to fly!
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As soon as people started having some basic understanding of the way the human brain works, the temptation to create a robot was too much to resist. One cannot construct a human-like robot without vision, and one cannot disassociate understanding the way the human visual system works from building artificial vision systems. Once this point is appreciated, the obvious next step is to bring together neurophysiologists, psychologists and engineers to work on this problem.
This book was born out of such a desire. It uses the conventional understanding of the workings of the human visual system, in order to construct engineering solutions to robotic vision. The book only touches the surface of what is a vast area of research, but it gives a flavour of all relevant issues to a very complex problem, from the physiology and psychology of human vision to the hardware implementation of attention mechanisms and the mathematics behind them.
Enjoy it!
Maria Petrou
Imperial College, London
March, 2009 |
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