
The Ancient Secrets of Computer Vision: The Evolution of Human Vision - addlesee
https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/the-ancient-secrets-of-computer-vision-2-by-joseph-redmon-condensed-934e16eacb44
======
cracker_jacks
In our research, we show that the fovea observed many times in biology may be
an emergent property that emerged from an attention system:

[https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2017/11/09/learn-to-attend-
fo...](https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2017/11/09/learn-to-attend-fovea/)

------
Jun8
"Interestingly, Octopuses have very similar eyes but do not have a blind-spot.
This is because our optic nerve comes out of the retina into the eye and then
back out, whereas optic nerves in an octopus come out in the opposite
direction."

This "design flaw", i.e. placing wiring (nerves) in front of detectors
(retina) is interesting and has been discussed at length (e.g.
[https://www.quora.com/Is-Dawkins-right-about-the-human-
eye-b...](https://www.quora.com/Is-Dawkins-right-about-the-human-eye-being-
wired-backwards-in-%E2%80%9CThe-Blind-Watchmaker%E2%80%9D)), because it is
point of contention for people arguing for Intelligent Design. Cephalod eyes
evolved differently so don't have this problem (impossible not to feel a bit
jealousy for this, like the randomized gradient decent optimization designed
by your colleague converging on a much better solution than yours :-)

~~~
GuiA
I don’t understand how it is a point of contention for people arguing for
intelligent design. Wouldn’t it fall in the same category as questions like
“if God is so good why are there wars and poverty”, where the answer is “to
your feeble human mind it would seem like a design flaw, but God knows
everything and everything He does is perfect but because you’re not God you
can’t understand his brilliance”?

~~~
NotSammyHagar
I think so. Another way to say this is "if you think you observed a flaw in
humans, it's by definition not a flaw cause god doesn't do those". Like heart
attacks, childhood brain cancer, blind-spot in our eyes.

------
zeristor
This is a lovely Quanta article about how mammals had to survive by being
nocturnal, and how the eyes once adjusted for dark condidtions could not
evolve back to being used in daylight:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/hyperuniformity-found-in-
bird...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/hyperuniformity-found-in-birds-math-
and-physics-20160712/)

Now what would be darn nifty would be replacing the somewhat deficient
mammalian optical system with something like the avian system. Would that it
were so simple to splice a few genes over...

I loved this article on so many levels, although I need a bit of a run up to
get the hang of hyperuniformity (which I think is the same as random
matricies)

------
paulftw
Good read, but AFAICT researches still don’t fully understand how birds fly,
yet planes fly at higher altitudes and at faster speeds. Computer vision is
probably not going to mimic human eye that closely

~~~
jimfleming
This is sort of true. Birds are significantly more energy efficient than
planes for some kinds of flight. Birds are also able to perform maneuvers that
planes cannot such as landing on a branch. For transportation we just don't
care about these features.

I agree that CV does not need to mimick everything about human vision but we
still have a long way to go before having vision as robust and efficient as
humans. Moreover there are benefits in interpretability and explainability to
mimicking human vision more closely. If CV perceived the world similarly it
can fail in more similar and predictable ways.

