Abstract

We live in a three-dimensional world, yet the image of that three-dimensional world is mapped onto our two-dimensional retinae. One of the oldest and most enduring questions regarding spatial vision is how we analyze those two-dimensional images to derive information about variations in depth from which we construct a three-dimensional percept. There are many visual cues for recognising depth or three-dimensional shape that can be obtained from the monocular visual image. This chapter discusses some of the traditional monocular and binocular cues to depth, with a selective emphasis upon how the types of information processing we know to take place in the striate cortex might play a role in this process.