Does the brain de-jitter retinal images?

摘要

As anyone who has taken a photograph with shaky hands can attest, camera movement creates image blur. Because photosensors must integrate over a finite interval to acquire a noise-free image, any motion that occurs during that interval will blur over the spatial details of an object by the amount of space traversed (Fig. 1). This simple fact creates headaches for engineers designing scientific imaging systems and commercial digital cameras. It is also a problem that the nervous system of any animal with moving eyes-from jumping spiders to humans-must deal with in processing images, but little is currently known about how they do it. In PNAS, Burak et al. (1) propose a potential neural mechanism for solving this problem in the human visual system.