Human vision and electronic imaging

The field of electronic imaging has made incredible strides over the past decade producing systems with higher signal quality, complex data formats, sophisticated operations for analyzing and visualizing information, advanced interfaces, and richer image environments. Since electronic imaging systems and applications are designed for human users, the success of these systems depends on the degree to which they match the features of human vision and cognition. This paper reviews the interplay between human vision and electronic imaging, describing how the methods, models and experiments in human vision have influenced the development of imaging systems, and how imaging technologies and applications have raised new research questions for the vision community. Using the past decade of papers from the IS&T/SPIE Conference on Human Vision and Electronic imaging as a lens, we trace a path up the "perceptual food chain," showing how research in low-level vision has influenced image quality metrics, image compression algorithms, rendering techniques and display design, how research in attention and pattern recognition have influenced the development of image analysis, visualization, and digital libraries systems, and how research in higher-level functions is involved in the design of emotional, aesthetic, and virtual systems. (C) 2001 SPIE and IS&T.