Perspective Chapter: Bionic Color Theory

Abstract

Despite a lot of research, the actual methodology of how the vertebrate retina encodes the final color experience from its 3 color-sensitive sensory cells in such a way that it allows us to experience the world as we see it through the visual brain centers is still far from completely clear. Two phenomena in particular have shaped our research in recent years: the first was that, despite complex technical filter chains, the colors we see never looked the way we see them, and the second was the phenomenon that we experience the world more vividly, as it appears in photographs. The latest generation of cell phone images today show quasi-plastic scenes, but we only have two eyes that create this impression independently of each other. But that can only mean that the retina processes images differently than we have previously technically implemented. The following paper therefore discusses a new image processing chain that leads to “eye-like” images, without complex filter architectures, by one eye only and process in a bionic way at the first layer of picture analysis, the retina.