Animal Eyes and Video Surveillance
P. Tomasz, Ranjit Pradh · InTech eBooks · 2011
Introduction1.1 "Natural engineering", human engineering, and "artificial abstraction" Nature created a multitude of forms of animal eyes as a manifestation of "natural engineering."Human engineering (HE) came much later, creating its own forms of artificial vision or video imagery, some of them as repetitions of natural engineering (NE) and some of them as supposed-to-be NE-repetitions (i.e., possibly wrong guesses); these latter we call "artificial abstractions" (AAs), being an interesting product of human imagination.This paper is about relationships among these various forms of engineering in respect to animal eyes.Although the earth has existed for several billion years, the vast majority of animal forms having eyes similar to those in existence today appeared during the so-called Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago, probably related to development of a new NE-based concept of operation (CONOPS): visually-guided-predation, which, in turn, created new NEconstructions: larger (macroscopic) animals with hardened tissue.This hardened tissue was necessary to create pigment-based vignetting effect, a precursor of animal vision (Fig. 1).Through the movement of such a primitive eye (through all-body movement), various photoreceptors would receive different optical signals, thus, creating a kind of spatial vision.Further NE developments have bifurcated into two basic directions: apposition eyes (such as bug eyes) and imaging eyes, the latter to be found in almost all vertebrates.In Section 2, we will discuss one of the first attempts to study the animal eye, Maxwell's "fish-eye," and aquatic eyes based on Graded-Index (GRIN) optics, including an Artificial Abstraction (AA): "fish-eye" catadioptric systems.In Section 3 the recently discovered concept of the lobster eye is reviewed in detail, while in Section 4 both natural vision and artificial color vision are studied.In Section 5, optical imaging resolution/sensitivity, in the context of animal eyes, are studied, while in Section 6, animal mirrors, vignetting, anti-reflection (AR) structures, total internal reflection, camouflage, and the other natural optical elements are discussed.In Section 7, a new concept of spectral imaging as a manifestation of HE-based apposition eyes, is introduced.In Section 8, the neurophysiology of the retina and visual cortex, in the context of video imagery, is analyzed, and, finally, a summary and overall discussion of AA examples, are presented in Section 9. Abbreviations are reduced to a minimum, although some of them, such as HE, NE, and AA, are used throughout the text for the sake of space.Some others, such as TIR, GRIN, CONOPS are commonly used in engineering literature.Others, containing a great many words, are used only locally for the sake of space.