Training & Experience

All visual information is a pattern of light from either a primary light source or through reflections from surfaces within the scene. The image intensity depends on the illumination, the reflectance properties and the shape of objects. Thus, all visual information is ambiguous and the problem of estimating distal properties from the proximal stimulus is under-constrained. The visual system is faced with the problem of reconstructing the 3D scene from the 2D retinal image however, we do see the world unambiguously. How does the visual system process information that give rise to the coherent environment that we see? From the start of my PhD I have been fascinated by this result and tried to understand how the visual system estimates all these abundant descriptions that we use to depict the world around us and what cues in the image are relevant for appearance. The questions that fascinate me as a scientist do not end that the computations that are crucial to measure appearance, but also the computations that are needed to encode that information. All this incoming visual information is inherently so rich that fully processing that information exceeds the capacities of the visual system. Ultimately, I wish to investigate how the brain carries out these computations that determine the appearance of the world around us and the encoding of visual information in order to make decisions.