How We See - Eye Anatomy & Visual Perception
Wonder how the eyes work?
Do you know?
It's the brain that does the seeing, and not the eyes...
Written by Yap Tiong Peng
The eye is an important sensory organ that enables all of us to see. However, it can be argued that the brain does the 'seeing' because the eye is actually a neural extension of the brain.
It is the neural retina that pre-processes the things we see before they are transmitted to the brain for further processing. So you can understand why the health of the retina is so important!
Retinal Health Screening Services by IGARD (Click Here)
Some of my recent research on the neural retina includes studying it in an engineering perspective. I completed my research dissertation and project in visualising the connectivity and functionality of the biological visual system at Imperial College in London. The project was successfully implemented on a simplistic foveal model of the neural retina.
Many engineering concepts relates to the efficient and advanced nature of the neural retina of the human eye. They include (1) photo-transduction, (2) operating dynamics & adaptaion to light, (3) noise reduction and gain modulation, (4) data compression in peripheral retina, (5) spatial band-pass filtering for extrating local contrast, (6) edge detection, (7) multiple parallel pathways, (8) colour-opponency channels and (9) analogue-to-digital conversion.
These are some engineering principles that are fundamental in the study of optometry and visual sciences.