Available again, an influential book that offers a framework for
understanding visual perception and considers fundamental questions
about the brain and its functions.
David Marr's posthumously published Vision (1982) influenced a
generation of brain and cognitive scientists, inspiring many to enter
the field. In Vision, Marr describes a general framework for
understanding visual perception and touches on broader questions about
how the brain and its functions can be studied and understood.
Researchers from a range of brain and cognitive sciences have long
valued Marr's creativity, intellectual power, and ability to integrate
insights and data from neuroscience, psychology, and computation. This
MIT Press edition makes Marr's influential work available to a new
generation of students and scientists.
In Marr's framework, the process of vision constructs a set of
representations, starting from a description of the input image and
culminating with a description of three-dimensional objects in the
surrounding environment. A central theme, and one that has had
far-reaching influence in both neuroscience and cognitive science, is
the notion of different levels of analysis--in Marr's framework, the
computational level, the algorithmic level, and the hardware
implementation level.
Now, thirty years later, the main problems that occupied Marr remain
fundamental open problems in the study of perception. Vision provides
inspiration for the continuing efforts to integrate knowledge from
cognition and computation to understand vision and the brain.
