Next Generation Artificial Vision Systems , edited by Anil Bharath and Maria Petrou of the Imperial College in London, is a broad-scoped review that presents current technology in the physiology of vision and the software and hardware developments inspired by it. Overall, the book is almost as remarkable as the vision system itself in its attempts to integrate such a wide range of material into a cogent, meaningful whole. It is written at a high level, with fairly little background or introductory material.
The book contains 14 chapters and is divided into three parts. The first section, “The Physiology and Psychology of Vision,” explains the anatomy of the eye and visual cortex and their roles and interconnections. However, this section does more than just provide background for later discussions of how technology is being used to imitate human vision; it describes in detail experiments demonstrating how many of the roles and interconnections of the system have been deduced. This section should be clear to anyone with knowledge of anatomy and physiology.
The second section, “The Mathematics of Vision,” provides mathematical models that have been developed and implemented in software to describe or imitate the visual system. These have been specifically based or modeled on what is known about the function of human vision. In many cases, their ability to provide outputs similar to the vision system given the same inputs are demonstrated. A fair amount of mathematical or image processing background would be desirable to obtain the most benefit from this section.
The final section, “Hardware Technologies for Vision,” contains descriptions of actual electronic implementations that attempt to mimic the visual system. Primarily, these are low-level sensing and image-processing techniques; however, a few more complicated functions, such as feature tracking, are presented. An electronics or electrical engineering background would be helpful for easily comprehending this material.
The main flaw of the book is the figures, many of which are tiny and of poor contrast. Some reference color, when the book is published entirely in black and white. Certainly a book on human vision would be much better served by using a full range of color plates.
At its best, this book provides the reader with a sense of wonder at the complexity of human vision and the amazing research being performed to understand and imitate it. At its worst, it creates in the reader a sense of frustration that such high-level topics are presented with no background to help understand them. However, the editors have done a very good job of trying to integrate such a wide range of complex material; they were careful to maintain their focus, and later chapters frequently refer the reader back to the physiologic bases for the mathematical and hardware approaches.
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