Human vision and electronic imaging

The field of electronic imaging has made incredible strides over the past d ecade producing systems with higher signal quality, complex data formats, s ophisticated operations for analyzing and visualizing information, advanced interfaces, and richer image environments. Since electronic imaging system s and applications are designed for human users, the success of these syste ms depends on the degree to which they match the features of human vision a nd cognition. This paper reviews the interplay between human vision and ele ctronic imaging, describing how the methods, models and experiments in huma n vision have influenced the development of imaging systems, and how imagin g technologies and applications have raised new research questions for the vision community. Using the past decade of papers from the IS&T/SPIE Confer ence on Human Vision and Electronic imaging as a lens, we trace a path up t he "perceptual food chain," showing how research in low-level vision has in fluenced image quality metrics, image compression algorithms, rendering tec hniques and display design, how research in attention and pattern recogniti on have influenced the development of image analysis, visualization, and di gital libraries systems, and how research in higher-level functions is invo lved in the design of emotional, aesthetic, and virtual systems. (C) 2001 S PIE and IS&T.