There is more to vision than meets the eye

Talk by S. P. Arun (IISc, Bengaluru) on the topic 'There is more to vision than meets the eye' during the 36th mid year meeting of the IASc. The event was hosted in the IISc, Bengaluru on 04,05 July 2025.

Abstract of the talk published as follows.

We see and recognize objects effortlessly every day, but in fact vision is
an extremely challenging computational problem. The best computer vision
algorithms today still struggle at the simplest of vision tasks. Vision is not easy
for the brain either: nearly 40% of the brain is taken up by visual processing
of one kind or the other. Damage to visual processing regions in the brain
causes complex disorders that are difficult to treat because we still do not
understand normal visual processing. So how does the brain accomplish
vision? What are the underlying mechanisms and algorithms?
Our lab has been studying how the brain solves vision by investigating
perception and brain activity in humans, behavior and neural activity in
monkeys, and by comparing vision in brains and machine algorithms. I will
present some of our recent work demonstrating some novel computations
performed by the brain to solve property-based visual tasks in humans, and
also some exciting findings elucidating the neural basis of real-world vision
in monkeys