![]() ![]() What Bela did was create a pair of identical random dot patterns. More than one hundred twenty years after Brewster and Wheatstone, Bela realized that his random dot patterns could be used to probe this question. Bela read much of the literature of that time, and he must have seen two greats as wrestling without either finding the overwhelming hold to pin down the other. Wheatstone insisted that the images in the each eye had identifiable landmarks that were combined to assign depth to the landmarks. (Though it may seem odd for physicists to concern themselves with the physiology of optics, this was felt to be a natural extension of the study of the physics of optics.) Brewster opined that perspective was the source of the apprehension of an object's shape. ![]() The basis of this three-dimensional perception was hotly debated between Wheatstone and fellow physicist Sir David Brewster. Oliver Wendell Holmes, stereoscope enthusiast, wrote of the experience that “the shutting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration of the whole attention, which is a consequence of this, produce a dreamlike exaltation…in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits” ( Holmes 1861). Sir Charles Wheatstone showed in 1838 that if two different perspective images were observed through a stereoscope so that each eye observed only one view, a startlingly realistic three-dimensional image occurred. ![]() Most of us know well that we can use the small differences in the images in each eye to see depth. This success in exploiting the visual system, and the intellectual freedom intrinsic to the design of Bell Labs, provided Bela with the opportunity to use these new random dot patterns to explore the visual system. Photograph courtesy of Rutgers University Michael Noll's computer art exhibition, “Computer-Generated Pictures,” held at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York City, in 1965. ).īela Julesz, in front of a picture from his and A. He termed this talent “scientific bilingualism” ( Julesz 1994). What caused Bela to choose this unusual approach to looking for patterns, combining computers and vision? His doctoral thesis research in network theory and television signals clearly influenced him, but it was quintessential Bela to give himself a hand up into a new field by building on his base of knowledge, moving in a new and unexpected direction using mathematical and psychological insight. Any repeats, any correlations across space, would be instantly seen by the human visual system as patterns in the random dots. The random bits of zeros and ones drawn from the random number sequences were plotted as sequential rows in an image. Bela told the story that he was assigned the problem of testing these number generators he decided to use the best pattern recognizer that he knew of-the human visual system. One of the projects underway at the time was the creation of long random-number binary sequences that did not repeat. When the unexpected Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 spurred his emigration to the United States, Bela Julesz, with his Hungarian doctorate in engineering, joined the numerous mathematical luminaries working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, such as John Tukey, Harry Nyquist, Claude Shannon, and John Kelly. The selection of his major discipline, which would eventually be called visual neuroscience, may have been serendipity or choice. Throughout his career, Bela Julesz created new scientific disciplines by remarkable combinations of seemingly disparate approaches.
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