Scientific Photography and Applied Imaging

2 Limits of human visual perception

2.1 Introduction

The eye and camera are generally assumed to be similar. Both use a lens, an iris, a focusing system and a photosensor, see Table 2.1 for some points of comparison. But vision is complex, while the camera is simple and believed to be unbiased. A belief that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is persistent in spite of the daily publication of examples of manipulated and altered images.

Human vision, or rather visual perception, in suitable lighting gives a virtual three-dimensional (3D) image in full colour capable of detecting movement (Pirenne, 1967). Perception is an eye/brain combination where the eye(s) provide the observation using suitably encoded geometric data from the retinal images (Cornsweet, ...