Human vision and perception

Abstract

This chapter covers some basic aspects of the fundamentals of the human visual perception. Given the enormity of the subject, we will only give a very limited account of this huge area of intellectual activity. We will first discuss the structure of the visual system that is necessary to understand the functional processing of visual information and its limitations. Next, we will elaborate on some classic visual psychophysical results that delineate the limits of detection and discrimination. With these basics, we will introduce the reader to three important streams of information processing pertinent to lighting and display technologies, namely, spatial vision, flicker fusion, and color vision. We do not discuss many aspects of visual perception such as binocular visual perception, shape and form recognition, face recognition, etc. due to space constraints. Good overviews and detailed discussions of various aspects of visual perception can be found in a number of books, e.g., Cornsweet (1970), Schwartz (2010), Palmer (1999), Norton et al. (2002), and Werner and Chalupa (2013), and Chalupa and Werner (2003) or in the chapter by Lakshminarayanan and Raghuram (2003).