Visual Perception

Rating:
Summary: A great book on the psychology and physics of vision
Review: This is a great book if you want to understand how visual perception works up to the level of color and intensity (sorry, nobody understands pattern recognition yet!).

Tom Cornsweet explains in great detail how light acts on the rods and cones in your retina, and what sorts of neural activity the light stimulates. He then presents experimental results that explain how color and contrast are perceived.

Many authors present color vision and trichromacy in varying degrees of clarity (gosh, it's hard to write this without lots of visual metaphors). What's unique in Cornsweet is his section on dichromacy -- how an eye with only two kinds of color receptor would perceive light. The short dichromacy section makes trichromacy so much more understandable. In particular it makes clear why the color receptors have such broad and overlapping spectral sensitivity, and why so many different combinations of wavelengths can produce the same color perception.

If anyone from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich is reading this review, consider it a plea: please bring back Cornsweet!

Rating:
Summary: Best text on visual psychophysics/physiology I've read.
Review: This is a text I read many years ago, but it made such an impression on me, I remember it more vividly than any science text I've ever read. I still feel, these many years later, that I have benefited a great deal from this book. It contributed greatly to my sense of the visual system. I hear it may no longer be available, but I recommend you hunt down a used copy if you are at all interested in this subject