Abstract

Of the stream of visual information that meets the eye, some is retained and some is thrown away. That which is retained could in principle be represented in many ways, but the brain has chosen a particular representation that emphasizes the parameters of scale, location, orientation, motion, luminance, and two color coordinates. This representation may be visualized as a partition of the image stream into various bands in the spatiotemporal frequency domain. I discuss how this partition may be visualized, how it may be represented mathematically, how it may be implemented by simple neural operations, what purpose it may serve in the visual process, and how it may be exploited in the design of digital video systems.

© 1991 Optical Society of America