Brian Rogers

Research Summary

My research interests as an experimental psychologist are in all aspects of human visual perception but specifically in the perception of the 3-D world.  There are many sources of information about the 3-D world but two of the most important are binocular stereopsis and motion parallax.  Our research has shown that human observers are able to use both the small differences or disparities between the images reaching the two eyes and the patterns of relative motion generated as we move around to identify and discriminate the fine details of object structure and layout.

I am also interested in the long-standing philosophical debate between those who see perception as a process of inference and guessing based on sparse information and those who believe that the available information is rich and only needs to be ‘picked up’.  My own view is that perception is better understood as a evolved process that allows us to extract the affordances (meanings) of the world rather than one for identifying images and objects.

Discovering how humans and other animals perceive the world has important implications for the design and construction of machine vision systems, robotics and the development of display technologies for 3-D TV and cinema.  To this end, we have active collaborations with the Department of Engineering Science in Oxford as well as with other universities around the world.