Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 105 of 171
Eyes only count photons
all the eye is doing is catching and counting photons. The millions of photoreceptors in our eyes only react to the number of photons they catch. Our brains then construct the colors, shapes, objects, depths, motion, or textures we see based partly on how many photons the photoreceptors are catching at any given instant. This is why computer vision is such a difficult challenge. If the input to a computer vision system is a video camera, all the computer gets is a huge array of meaningless numbers, just like our brains only get photon counts from our eyes. From this, the computer must construct the meaning of images it is receiving. The fact that our brains do this in hundreds of…