PICTURE THIS
To celebrate the year, we look at the world with fresh eyes.
Humans see the world three kinds of cone cells (receptors used for colour vision) that give us the world, usually in reasonable focus, in red, green, blue (RGB) colour. It can be easy to overlook how different life looks from a different perspective.
Diurnal birds have an extra cone cell that’s sensitive to UV wavelengths. Additionally, each cone contains a drop of oil that acts in a similar fashion to a camera lens, allowing them to better differentiate hues.
Sharks are much more sensitive to light, but lack the receptor cells to see in colour – prey in monochrome.
Composed of thousands of individual optical receptors called ommatidia, a fly’s compound eyes can’t focus with anything like human accuracy, but they allow a 360-degree view and are awfully good at picking up the slightest of movements – such as someone trying to swat their owner.
Snakes are dichromatic – they see in two primary colours, blue and green. Most types are sensitive to UV light, and some species also have vision in infra-red, allowing them to heat-seek as well.
Computer vision, or CV, is the field of study aimed to get computers to “see” and interpret imagery such as photographs and video. Allinformation, no matter how complex, is stored by binary combination: 1 or 0.