About me
My research interests started with Helga Kolb’s paper “How the retina works”, the first paper my supervisor Mingliang Pu recommended. After that, I was deeply attracted by this delicate slim tissue and devoted myself to understanding its organization and function better. My personal recommended material about retina is the online textbook WEBVISION maintained by Bryan Jones now.
Echoes with Kolb’s paper, the big question I am curious about is how the eye, especially the retina, samples visual scenes and encodes them into neural information. To uncover that, my current efforts and thoughts include:
- Sampling mechanisms of the retina
- Every animal species has its own distinct retinal cell distribution pattern, what the reason and function is? Some quanlitative descriptions of this exist, but quantitative consideration is still lacking.
- A major difference between animal eyes from cameras is the non-uniform sampling, because perceiving rapidly is much more important than seeing clearly to animal survival. How can this rule inspire artificial designs?
- Retinal modeling
- Retinal neuronal connections are ordered but complex. Connectomics can provide more comprehensive and precise observations.
- Physiological recording of retinal neuronal activity through microscopy can provide wider observation fields and thus many novel insights.
- Efficient bio-image processing
- Above researching techniques development promote data (image here) production, efficient processing pipelines are essential to converting images to knowledge (I2K).
- I’d rather to take image processing as the “retina” of computational vision, which deals with raw data for later better understanding.