Visual encoding: Principles and software

For more than two centuries scientists and engineers have worked to understand and model how the eye encodes electromagnetic radiation (light). We now understand the principles of how light is transmitted through the optics of the eye and encoded by retinal photoreceptors and light-sensitive neurons. In recent years, new instrumentation has enabled scientists to measure the specific parameters of the optics and photoreceptor encoding. We implemented the principles and parameter estimates that characterize the human eye in an open-source software toolbox. This chapter describes the principles behind these tools and illustrates how to use them to compute the initial visual encoding.