Computer Vision

Two men look out through the same bars:
One sees the mud, and one the stars.

For any man with half an eye,
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs I ween,
To see what is not to be seen.

Not so many years ago this was a mistake that brain scientists actually made: they succumbed all too often to the temptation to treat vision as if it were television — as if it were simply a matter of getting "the picture" from the eyes to the screen somewhere in the middle where it could be handsomely reproduced so that the phenomena of appreciation and analysis could then get underway. Today we realize that the analysis — the whatever you want to call it that composes, in the end, all the visual understanding — begins right away, on the retina; if you postpone consideration of it, you misdescribe how vision works.