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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2025 Apr 15.
Published in final edited form as: Annu Rev Vis Sci. 2024 Sep 19;10(1):23–46. doi: 10.1146/annurev-vision-101623-025432

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Motion detection is an inference problem. (a) A natural scene. (b) An intensity trace across the highlighted slice in panel a. Circles denote locations at which intensity is detected by an eye and correspond to the locations of time traces in panel c. (c) Intensity traces (bottom) created by an image moving with time-varying velocity (top). The visual system processes the intensity traces to infer the velocity. (d) A spatiotemporal intensity pattern created by the scene moving rightward at a constant speed. Velocity estimation is equivalent to estimating the slope of this pattern. (e) Self-motion creates optic flow across the retina. When an animal rotates about a vertical axis, flow is in the azimuthal direction at all elevations (top). When an animal translates through the world, the flow direction and speed depend on the angle with respect to the direction of movement, as well as the distance to objects (bottom). Panels a–c adapted with permission from Mano et al. (2021).