This book consists of papers presented at an international symposium
spon- sored and organised by The Rank Prize Funds and held at The Royal
Society, London, on 27-29 September, 1982. Since the inception of the
Funds, the Trustees and their Scientific Advi- sory Committee on
Opto-e1ectronics have considered that the scope of opto- electronics
should extend to cover the question of how the eye transduces and
processes optical information. The Funds have aimed to organise symposia
on topics which, because of their interdisciplinary nature, were not
well cov- ered by other regular international scientific meetings. It
was therefore very appropriate that the 1982 symposium should be on
Physical and Biologi- cal Processing of Images. The purpose of the
symposium was to bring together scientists working on the physiology and
psychology of visual perception with those developing ma- chine systems
for image processing and understanding. The papers were planned in such
a way as to emphasise questions of how image-analysing systems can be
organised, as well as the principles underlying them, rather than the
detailed biophysics and structure of sensory systems or the specific
design of hardware devices. As far as possible, related topics in
biological and artificial sys- tems were considered side by side.