Abstract
A natural scene contains fine spatial detail at low contrast (Srinivasan et al., 1982), and to represent it as an optical image on the retina requires quite a lot of light This is because the number of photons arriving at a given locus fluctuates according to Poisson statistics. For an image to emerge above this fluctuating background of “photon noise” an object must be brighter than the mean luminance by at least one standard deviation (corresponding to the square root of the mean luminance) (Rose, 1973). Consider an example from baseball, a high fly ball just barely visible against the bright sky. At 100 meters from the outfielder’s eye the ball subtends only 12 cones and is brighter than the sky by about 0.3 %. To represent this low contrast spot requires that the ball reflect onto the retina at least 12 × 104 photons per cone integration time (√(12 × 104) /12 × 104 = 0.3%). The number of extra photons per cone above the mean is only 30.
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Sterling, P., Cohen, E., Smith, R.G., Tsukamoto, Y. (1992). Retinal circuits for daylight: why ballplayers don’t wear shades. In: Eeckman, F.H. (eds) Analysis and Modeling of Neural Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4010-6_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4010-6_15
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