Effects of Ocular Optical Aberrations on Non-overlapped Image Filtering

Recent results in retinal research have shown that ganglion cell receptive fields cover the mammalian retina in a mosaic arrangement, with insignificant amounts of overlap in the central fovea. This finding implies that from the informatics point of view there is a major conceptual gap between traditional and widely accepted, convolution based image filtering algorithms, and the way visual information is processed by the retina in the eye. The use of traditional filters with non-overlapping operator architectures leads to considerable information losses between centers of filter kernels. This paper introduces a novel model of the eye-retina system that fills the conceptual gap of information processing between the retina and the overlapping (convolution based) architectures used by todays widely adapted algorithms. The proposed computational model takes into consideration data convergence, as well as the dynamic and optical properties of the eye lens. Based on the evaluation of the model, three hypotheses are formulated on the role of the optical precision of the eye-lens and involuntary eye accommodation dynamics.