Reference manual delivers on its vision

By Brian Dipert -- EDN, 12/7/2000

Stanford University professor Brian Wandell's 476-pg, $67.95 Foundations of Vision (ISBN 0878938532) is to the eyes what Zwicker and Fasti's Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models is to the ears (see "Technical reference enhances your audio perception," EDN, Sept 1, 2000, pg 20). Wandell's book provides both a deep and a broad treatment of the theory behind and application of various human-visual-system characteristics. The author divides the book into encoding, representation, and interpretation sections. Encoding describes how the visual pathways encode the retinal image, representation describes how the neural response within the peripheral and early cortical visual pathways represent the encoded image, and interpretation defines how we interpret the retinal image and assign perceptual properties to objects.

If you've ever wondered how the eyes, neural pathways, and brain interact; how we detect and respond to object motion; or how our sensitivity varies in response to various colors, shapes, patterns, illumination types, and intensities, this book is for you. These characteristics have important engineering implications, such as in the design of lossy still-image and video-compression algorithms, optics, and sensor systems. Foundations of Vision might sound like an intimidating project best left for a lengthy vacation, but the book is surprisingly easy to read. Wandell includes a 40-pg appendix and 18-pg bibliography in case you're inspired to conduct even more in-depth study.

Sinauer Associates, 1-413-549-4300, www.sinauer.com.

—by Brian Dipert