Béla Julesz
Encyclopedia
Béla Julesz was a visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual
and auditory perception
.
Julesz was the originator of random dot stereogram
s which led to the creation of autostereogram
s. He also was the first to study texture discrimination by constraining second-order statistics.
, Hungary
, on February 19, 1928. He immigrated to the United States with his wife Margit after receiving his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
in 1956.
In 1956, Julesz joined the renowned Bell Laboratories, where he headed the Sensory and Perceptual Processes Department (1964–1982), then the Visual Perception Research Department (1983–1989). Much of his research focused on physiological psychology
topics including depth perception
and pattern recognition
within the visual system
.
In 1959, Julesz created the random-dot stereogram using pairs of random dot patterns that were identical except for slight differences in the horizontal position of a subset of dots. When these patters were viewed one to each eye via a stereoscope, the subset of dots appeared to be at a different depth
from the remainder. Julesz referred to this, whimsically, as cyclopean vision
, after the mythical Cyclops
, a creature with a single eye in its forehead instead of the usual two. This was because the shape of the depth area was invisible to either eye separately; it is visible only to the cyclopean eye of stereoscopic perception that combines the information from the two eyes. Later, Christopher Tyler
, a former student of Julesz, used the principles of random-dot stereograms to invent autostereogram
s, which create the same effect using a single image instead of two.
Julesz made important contributions to the theory of human visual perception of texture. In 1962 he originated the Julesz Conjecture, which states that humans cannot distinguish between textures with identical second-order
statistics
. In 1973, he proved this conjecture false, though the concept that image textures could be modeled based on low-order statistics remained.. In 1981, he originated the Texton Theory, which states that textons, composed of local image features, are "the putative units of pre-attentive human texture perception".
In 1989, he retired from Bell Labs and began teaching in the Psychology
department at Rutgers University
in Piscataway, New Jersey. It was there that he established and directed the Laboratory of Vision Research, which was dedicated to investigating mechanisms of stereopsis
, motion
, binocular vision
, texture perception and attention
. The lab helped establish neuroscience
as an important field of study at Rutgers. Julesz became professor emeritus in 1999, and remained the director of the lab until his death on December 31, 2003.
(1971). This book is often considered a classic of psychophysics
and cognitive science
, and has recently been added to the Millennium Project list of the 100 most-influential cognitive science books in the 20th century. This book has been republished in 2006 at MIT press.
and Artificial Intelligence
. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences
in 1987.
Visual perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision...
and auditory perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
.
Julesz was the originator of random dot stereogram
Random dot stereogram
Random Dot Stereograms are pairs of images of random dots which when viewed with the aid of a stereoscope, or with the eyes focused on a point behind the images, produce a sensation of depth, with objects appearing to be in front of or behind the actual images....
s which led to the creation of autostereogram
Autostereogram
An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram , designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional scene from a two-dimensional image in the human brain...
s. He also was the first to study texture discrimination by constraining second-order statistics.
Biography
Béla Julesz was born in BudapestBudapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, on February 19, 1928. He immigrated to the United States with his wife Margit after receiving his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest.-History:...
in 1956.
In 1956, Julesz joined the renowned Bell Laboratories, where he headed the Sensory and Perceptual Processes Department (1964–1982), then the Visual Perception Research Department (1983–1989). Much of his research focused on physiological psychology
Physiological psychology
Physiological psychology is a subdivision of behavioral neuroscience that studies the neural mechanisms of perception and behavior through direct manipulation of the brains of nonhuman animal subjects in controlled experiments...
topics including depth perception
Depth perception
Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions and the distance of an object. Depth sensation is the ability to move accurately, or to respond consistently, based on the distances of objects in an environment....
and pattern recognition
Pattern recognition
In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...
within the visual system
Visual system
The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which enables organisms to process visual detail, as well as enabling several non-image forming photoresponse functions. It interprets information from visible light to build a representation of the surrounding world...
.
In 1959, Julesz created the random-dot stereogram using pairs of random dot patterns that were identical except for slight differences in the horizontal position of a subset of dots. When these patters were viewed one to each eye via a stereoscope, the subset of dots appeared to be at a different depth
Depth perception
Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions and the distance of an object. Depth sensation is the ability to move accurately, or to respond consistently, based on the distances of objects in an environment....
from the remainder. Julesz referred to this, whimsically, as cyclopean vision
Cyclopean stimuli
Cyclopean stimuli is a form of visual stimuli that is defined by binocular disparity alone.It was named after the one-eyed Cyclops of Homer’s Odyssey by Bela Julesz. Julesz was a Hungarian radar engineer. He thought that stereopsis might help to discover hidden objects, this might be useful to...
, after the mythical Cyclops
Cyclops
A cyclops , in Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead...
, a creature with a single eye in its forehead instead of the usual two. This was because the shape of the depth area was invisible to either eye separately; it is visible only to the cyclopean eye of stereoscopic perception that combines the information from the two eyes. Later, Christopher Tyler
Christopher Tyler
Christopher W. Tyler is a visual psychophysicist, creator of the autostereogram and is the Head of the Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center.-Biography:Shortly after earning his PhD at the University of Keele , Dr...
, a former student of Julesz, used the principles of random-dot stereograms to invent autostereogram
Autostereogram
An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram , designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional scene from a two-dimensional image in the human brain...
s, which create the same effect using a single image instead of two.
Julesz made important contributions to the theory of human visual perception of texture. In 1962 he originated the Julesz Conjecture, which states that humans cannot distinguish between textures with identical second-order
Second-order stimulus
A second-order stimulus is a form of visual stimulus used in psychophysics in which objects are delineated from their backgrounds by differences of contrast or texture. On the contrary, a stimulus defined by differences in luminance is known as a first-order stimulus....
statistics
. In 1973, he proved this conjecture false, though the concept that image textures could be modeled based on low-order statistics remained.. In 1981, he originated the Texton Theory, which states that textons, composed of local image features, are "the putative units of pre-attentive human texture perception".
In 1989, he retired from Bell Labs and began teaching in the Psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
department at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in Piscataway, New Jersey. It was there that he established and directed the Laboratory of Vision Research, which was dedicated to investigating mechanisms of stereopsis
Stereopsis
Stereopsis refers to impression of depth that is perceived when a scene is viewed with both eyes by someone with normal binocular vision. Binocular viewing of a scene creates two slightly different images of the scene in the two eyes due the the eyes' different positions on the head...
, motion
Motion (physics)
In physics, motion is a change in position of an object with respect to time. Change in action is the result of an unbalanced force. Motion is typically described in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement and time . An object's velocity cannot change unless it is acted upon by a force, as...
, binocular vision
Binocular vision
Binocular vision is vision in which both eyes are used together. The word binocular comes from two Latin roots, bini for double, and oculus for eye. Having two eyes confers at least four advantages over having one. First, it gives a creature a spare eye in case one is damaged. Second, it gives a...
, texture perception and attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
. The lab helped establish neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
as an important field of study at Rutgers. Julesz became professor emeritus in 1999, and remained the director of the lab until his death on December 31, 2003.
Education
- 1956 - Ph.D., Hungarian Academy of SciencesHungarian Academy of SciencesThe Hungarian Academy of Sciences is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest.-History:...
- 1950 - Electrical EngineeringElectrical engineeringElectrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
, Technical UniversityBudapest University of Technology and EconomicsThe Budapest University of Technology and Economics , in hungarian abbreviated as BME, English official abbreviation BUTE, is the most significant University of Technology in Hungary and is also one of the oldest Institutes of Technology in the world, having been founded in 1782.-History:BME is...
, BudapestBudapestBudapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
Publications
Béla Julesz authored or collaborated on more than 200 publications, including Foundations of Cyclopean PerceptionFoundations of Cyclopean Perception
Foundations of Cyclopean Perception is a book by Bela Julesz, published in 1971....
(1971). This book is often considered a classic of psychophysics
Psychophysics
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they effect. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual...
and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, and has recently been added to the Millennium Project list of the 100 most-influential cognitive science books in the 20th century. This book has been republished in 2006 at MIT press.
Awards
Julesz was a State of New Jersey Professor who received a variety of awards throughout his illustrious career, including a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship ("genius award") for his work in Experimental PsychologyExperimental psychology
Experimental psychology is a methodological approach, rather than a subject, and encompasses varied fields within psychology. Experimental psychologists have traditionally conducted research, published articles, and taught classes on neuroscience, developmental psychology, sensation, perception,...
and Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
in 1987.
External links
- Flip Phillips's website. This site contains sample stereograms and supplemental images from Julesz's book, Foundations of Cylcopean Vision
- http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/zeus/julesz.html
- http://ur.rutgers.edu/medrel/viewArticle.html?ArticleID=3697
- http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=423145