Figure 2. Robustness of the human visual system to image transformations.

In spite of large transformations of the original image (top left) in terms of color, noise, scale, blurring, and inversion, recognition remains relatively straightforward. Careful psychophysics studies have quantified and documented the robustness of the human visual system to image transformations. Achieving specificity while maintaining tolerance to object transformations is one of the key challenges for computer vision and constitutes one of the hallmarks of object recognition in primates. Original photo taken by Julie Blumberg.