Active Visual Depth Perception by Looming

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This proposal is a project to measure and model looming responses of cellsin the optic ganglia (primarily the lobula) of the night-flying hawk moth,Manduca sexta. When the moth hovers in front of a flower to feed, windcauses the flower to move in the moth's visual field. The experimentsproposed are of two kinds: First, responses to a wide variety of visualstimuli will be recorded intracellularly as well as extracellularly fromlooming neurons in order to test if the trigger for the looming responsesare stimulus changes of luminance, changes of perimeter, or changes due tovisual flow fields. Second, computer models of these neuronal responseswill be constructed and tested with equivalent 'stimuli'. It is planned totest the models with real images by feeding into the models videos of e.g.foliage or flowers wiggling in the wind. One very practical future use ofsuch computer models may be in machine (robot) vision and in neuromorphicchips.