The world of electronic imaging is an explosion of hardware and software technologies, used in a variety of applications, in a wide range of domains. These technologies provide visual, auditory and tactile information to human observers, whose job it is to make decisions and solve problems. In this course, we will study fundamentals in human perception and cognition, and see how these principles can guide the design of systems that enhance human performance. We will study examples in display technology, image quality, visualization, image search, visual monitoring and haptics, and students will be encouraged to bring forward ongoing problems of interest to them.

Imaging, visualization and computer graphics provide visual representations of data in order to communicate, provide insight and enhance problem solving. The human observer actively processes these visual representations using perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years. The goal of this tutorial is to provide an introduction to these processing mechanisms, and to show how this knowledge can guide the decisions we make about how to represent data visually, how we visually represent patterns and relationships in data, and how we can use human pattern recognition to extract features in the data. The course is organized into four sections: Light, the Eye, and the Brain: Visual stimulus, visual physiology, eye movements, and neural pathways. Visual Information Processing: Luminance, contrast, spatial resolution, and spatial frequency; temporal frequency and motion; color vision; and luminance vs. color resolution. Visual Cognition - Attention and Perceptual Organization: Color as a "pre-attentive" cue, eye movements and visual attention, finding patterns and features, and representing relationships. Applying Perceptual Knowledge to Imaging, Visualization and Computer Graphics: Visual data representation, color maps, semantics, finding features and relationships in data, and a framework for addressing visualization and visual analysis perceptually.