The environments in which we live and the tasks we must perform to survive and reproduce
have shaped the design of our perceptual systems through evolution and experience …

Within natural images there is substantial spatial variation in both local contrast and local
luminance. Understanding the statistics of these variations is important for understanding the …

In visual perception, object identification requires both the ability to define regions of uniform
luminance and zones of luminance contrast. Neural processes underlying contrast detection …

During normal saccadic inspection of natural images, the receptive fields of cortical neurons
are bombarded with frequent simultaneous changes in local mean luminance and contrast …

A fundamental natural visual task is the identification of specific target objects in the
environments that surround us. It has long been known that some properties of the …

Macular degeneration and related visual disorders greatly limit foveal function, resulting in
reliance on the peripheral retina for tasks requiring fine spatial vision. Here we investigate …

Despite exposure to various sources of visual noise, we experience the surrounding world
as very stable. Evidence suggests that this sense of stability emerges as the visual system …

This work has been performed in the laboratory of Matteo Carandini and is the fruit of a close
collaboration with Vincent Bonin. It was initiated in 2001 at the Institute of Neuroinformatics …

The patterns of light falling onto our retinas vary from one instant to another. The magnitude
of these variations surpasses the dynamic range of the neurons by several orders of …

The human visual system is sensitive to 2nd-order image properties (often called texture
properties). Spatial gradients in certain 2nd-order properties are edge-based, in that …