An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision

Berkeley in the Modern Context

David Vernon

Department of Computer Science

Trinity College Dublin

Ireland

1 The Introduction

Understanding vision has always been, and remains, one of the greatest challenges facing man. It is the sense through which the vast majority of the information we gather about the world is mediated and assimilated. It is no surprise then that the way we conceive this assimilation by vision both shapes, and is shaped by, our conceptions of the form of the world in which we find ourselves and our existence in it. The mutual relationship between these ontological and epistemological considerations and the many theories of vision are not always dealt with in depth and often they are ignored altogether. But in one case, at least, the link between them was fully explored and exploited.

Berkeley (1685{1753), in An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, begins the advancement of his thesis on idealist and immaterialist ontology. He does this by addressing explicitly the nature of vision and the visible and their relationship with the tangible. His thesis that the visible is an aspect of mind is convincing and promotes acceptance; an acceptance which he exploits in his later work Principles when he renounces his position on the tangible and places them on the same footing as the visible. In doing so, Berkeley establishes his immaterialism and idealism as a position which, if not a very intuitive or comfortable one when you come upon it unprepared, is at least a plausible one worthy of attention.

Since the publication of Berkeley's essay, the quest to understand vision has gone on unabated and, in modern times, it has received a new impetus with the advent of the technology which permits empirical validation of current theories. In particular, the discipline of Computer Vision has grown very significantly over the past thirty years to the point where visually-perceptive artefacts are now commonplace. While the holy grail of the truly robust theory and implementation of vision as a whole remains disturbingly elusive, the pursuit of computer vision has contributed in no small way to our understading