Modeling Brightness Perception

Abstract

Visual psychophysics is a scientific area concerned with developing a complete understanding of how it works: from the physical input (the light flux entering the eye) to the output (the subjective image that we perceive). There are many aspects like brightness, contrast, color, shape, shading and texture. At the lowest level, from the eye to the primary visual cortex, which includes the retina, lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and even the first layers in the cortex, the processing done is already quite complex and our knowledge is still far from complete. There is substantial evidence that there is a very early organization in terms of “what” and “where” systems, which starts already in the retina and continues through the LGN to cortical areas. The parvo pathway is slow but handles high spatial frequencies (what) whereas the magno pathway is concerned with temporal transients and low spatial frequencies (where).