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> What would image compression look like if designed around other things perceptions? For computers, the question is meaningless because they only interact wit

> What would image compression look like if designed around other things perceptions? For computers, the question is meaningless because they only interact with our outside reality in the form of a "Chinese room" translation task. There's nothing inherently salient about image data to a computer, because the "ground floor" reality of computers is instructions for moving electrical charges around on some chips. But, given computers with built in cameras and having some use for discerning its reality of objects in 3d space, subject to Newtonian physics, and projected down to a 2d CCD array, the ideal compression would be subject to the same pressures as influenced the evolution of the human eyes and brain. Thus it should be similar. Isn't it funny how similar compression artifacts can be to the visual distortion of psychedelics.

eru 5y ago
> But, given computers with built in cameras and having some use for discerning its reality of objects in 3d space, subject to Newtonian physics, and projected down to a 2d CCD array, the ideal compression would be subject to the same pressures as influenced the evolution of the human eyes and brain. Thus it should be similar. You have a good point! Though I wouldn't say the 'same' pressures. We can actually identify differences in those pressure, and use those to speculate. Eg human computational capacity does well in terms of total operations performed, but individual units are really, really slow compared to electronics. That means human hardware can't run anything that requires a lot of 'serial depth', everything has to be almost embarrassingly parallel to work, or involve a lot of lookup from caches. Also the design of humans is constrained by what evolution can do. Eg we still have blind spots in our eyes, mostly because evolution can only take 'small steps' (small in the space of genes), and inverting the eye so that the light receptive cells are in front instead of behind the nerves and blood vessels is not a small step in that space. The power constraints on humans and computer are likely to be different. Humans are also not networked with sub-second latencies to the rest of world. (Just to be clear, the examples I gave are second-order corrections to your much more important first-order idea!)
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  I'll take it one step further. The arrangement of rods and cones in the eye are optimized precisely around the task of capturing the salient details of a projected image. The distribution has an exponential form radiating from the center precisely because the brain is working in log polar coordinates (or similar). CCD arrays are stuck with the naive 2d grid arrangement. https://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf https://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf
  - eru 5y ago
    Interesting! Though: I can believe that our arrangement is a local optimum, sure. (Local in some genetic sense.) That still doesn't make me believe that are anywhere close to a global optimum. Behold the octopus: > Do these design problems [of optical blind spots] exist because it is impossible to construct an eye that is wired properly, so that the light-sensitive cells face the incoming image? Not at all. Many organisms have eyes in which the neural wiring is neatly tucked away behind the photoreceptor layer. The squid and the octopus, for example, have a lens-and-retina eye quite similar to our own, but their eyes are wired right-side out, with no light-scattering nerve cells or blood vessels in front of the photoreceptors, and no blind spot. From https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/grand/page05.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/grand/page05.html

eru 5y ago

> But, given computers with built in cameras and having some use for discerning its reality of objects in 3d space, subject to Newtonian physics, and projected down to a 2d CCD array, the ideal compression would be subject to the same pressures as influenced the evolution of the human eyes and brain. Thus it should be similar. You have a good point! Though I wouldn't say the 'same' pressures. We can actually identify differences in those pressure, and use those to speculate. Eg human computational capacity does well in terms of total operations performed, but individual units are really, really slow compared to electronics. That means human hardware can't run anything that requires a lot of 'serial depth', everything has to be almost embarrassingly parallel to work, or involve a lot of lookup from caches. Also the design of humans is constrained by what evolution can do. Eg we still have blind spots in our eyes, mostly because evolution can only take 'small steps' (small in the space of genes), and inverting the eye so that the light receptive cells are in front instead of behind the nerves and blood vessels is not a small step in that space. The power constraints on humans and computer are likely to be different. Humans are also not networked with sub-second latencies to the rest of world. (Just to be clear, the examples I gave are second-order corrections to your much more important first-order idea!)

IIAOPSW 5y ago
I'll take it one step further. The arrangement of rods and cones in the eye are optimized precisely around the task of capturing the salient details of a projected image. The distribution has an exponential form radiating from the center precisely because the brain is working in log polar coordinates (or similar). CCD arrays are stuck with the naive 2d grid arrangement. https://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf https://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf
- eru 5y ago
  Interesting! Though: I can believe that our arrangement is a local optimum, sure. (Local in some genetic sense.) That still doesn't make me believe that are anywhere close to a global optimum. Behold the octopus: > Do these design problems [of optical blind spots] exist because it is impossible to construct an eye that is wired properly, so that the light-sensitive cells face the incoming image? Not at all. Many organisms have eyes in which the neural wiring is neatly tucked away behind the photoreceptor layer. The squid and the octopus, for example, have a lens-and-retina eye quite similar to our own, but their eyes are wired right-side out, with no light-scattering nerve cells or blood vessels in front of the photoreceptors, and no blind spot. From https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/grand/page05.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/grand/page05.html