Biological and machine vision

Summary form only given. Models of the biological vision process have influenced the concepts and realizations of technical image processing since 40 years: The results of Hubel and Wiesel have been used to structure the process of image interpretation into layers corresponding to the "receptive fields" to do preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. Unfortunately the performance of general purpose computers stayed far behind the processing requirements. The paper includes a short excursion into the history of the relations between new biological insights and technical image processing ideas and products