[Disparity sensitivity] [Absolute sensitivity]
[poster 2] [poster 3]
| [Owl Cam] [Ocular aberrations] [Contrast sensitivity] [Vernier acuity] [Disparity sensitivity] [Absolute sensitivity] |
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| The owl-cam: viewing through barn owl eyes | ||||||||||||||
| project ongoing | ||||||||||||||
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| download: [paper] [poster 1] [poster 2] [poster 3] |
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| The question is rather simple: How does the world looks like through the eyes of an animal? A straightforward solution would be to actually look at the images the animal sees. Here, we present an adaptation of this basic idea in the visual system of the barn owl. This project is initially based on a collaboration with Shay Ohayon. In the course of his master thesis, Shay visited our lab in 2006 for a few month. During this time he developed the owl-cam, a tiny wireless camera worn on the head of our barn owls (the picture on the right shows the 2008 model). Do have a look at Shay's page here, or here to learn more about him and his work. | ||||||||||||||
| television feature: [Lokalzeit] | ||||||||||||||
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| The barn owl makes an ideal candidate for this study, because their eyes are virtually locked in their orbit. Because it can not move its eyes, the barn owl turns its head in order to look at visual targets. In this way, the image recorded by the owl-cam remains aligned with the owl's gaze, finally enabling us to analyze the visual content of free-viewed natural images as are seen by the owl. | ||||||||||||||
| Barn owl equipped with the OwlCam | ||||||||||||||
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| The figure on the left shows actual stills from several owl-cam sequences, recorded in different locations: (A-C) indoor aviary, (D-F) office environment, (G-I) outdoors. In a first step, the camera's point of view has to be calibrated with respect to the animals view. In a simple search task, the owls viewed visual targets, scanning them in a serial manner in order to find a food item (A+B). The distractor targets are repeatedly brought into a distinct locus in the video image (red circle) and hence are likely to fall together with the owl's fixational area. Hereafter, owl-cam images are analyzed with respect to the informational content in that area. | ||||||||||||||
| Statistical analysis of >20,000 fixation images suggest that gaze control is modulated by top-down processes in the barn owl. | ||||||||||||||