Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information

By David Marr and David Marr

Book Overview

Available again, an influential book that offers a framework for understanding visual perception and considers fundamental questions about the brain and its functions.David Marr's posthumously published Vision (1982) influenced a generation of brain and cognitive scientists, inspiring many to enter the field. In Vision, Marr describes a general framework for understanding visual perception and touches on broader questions about how the brain and its functions can be studied and understood. Researchers from a range of brain and cognitive sciences have long valued Marr's creativity, intellectual power, and ability to integrate insights and data from neuroscience, psychology, and computation. This MIT Press edition makes Marr's influential work available to a new generation of students and scientists. In Marr's framework, the process of vision constructs a set of representations, starting from a description of the input image and culminating with a description of three-dimensional objects in the surrounding environment. A central theme, and one that has had far-reaching influence in both neuroscience and cognitive science, is the notion of different levels of analysis--in Marr's framework, the computational level, the algorithmic level, and the hardware implementation level. Now, thirty years later, the main problems that occupied Marr remain fundamental open problems in the study of perception. Vision provides inspiration for the continuing efforts to integrate knowledge from cognition and computation to understand vision and the brain. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0716715678
• ISBN13: 9780716715672
• Release Date: March 1983
• Publisher: W.H. Freeman & Company
• Length: 397 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.6" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Recommended

This book is interesting in the respect that it takes a biological view on computational vision. I do recommend it for that perspective which is certainly valuable. It does not have fair coverage of biologically inspired vision, nor does it correctly show the author's work in relation to others.

Revolutionary thinker

Although dead at the young age of 36 from leukemia, Marr's computational and mathematical approach to vision revolutionized the entire area of vision research, after which it was never the same. There are strong hints of this approach in the earlier work of Julesz and Gibson, but Marr's work takes the whole field a quantum leap further, giving it a rigorousness and mathematical elegance never before seen. For example, to mention...

this is an incredible book!

It is quite true: this is probably the best book on vision ever published. David Marr combined an incredible depth and width of knowledge in all neccessary fields (psychology, biology, mathematics, computer science) into this book. You will need some background in mathematics before you can fully appreciate Marr's theories. (Notably Fourier transforms) The most important thing about this book is that it represents ONE paradigm...

A MUST HAVE for researchers of human or machine vision!

This book has quickly become a classic since its publication in 1982. It offers an innovative theoretical approach to explain what it means when we say that we "see" something. Due to Marr's particular interests, his approach also offers, to those interested in creating machine vision that mimics human vision, potential algorithms for doing so. His breadth and depth of knowledge in mathematics, psychology, neurophysiology,...

The best book in vision among those published until now

I have been shocked three times after reading chapter one only of this book three years ago when I firstly contacted genius David Marr in my mind. It was because of i) his comprehensive understanding about human visual perception, ii) he was undoubtly young on the contrary to his comprehensiveness, and iii) regretfully he had gone young at his vital age. Until now, it is hard for me to deny his influences in directing...