
The Adelson lab studies various problems in visual perception, from the standpoints of both human vision and computer vision. Current topics involve "mid-level" visual processing, including perceptual organization, as applied to motion, transparency, lightness, and texture. We are also studying the perception of materials, i.e., how it is that we can tell that something is shiny or translucent, or that it is made of plastic or metal. In much of our work, the we are interested how humans (and machines) can utilize image statistics (such as those derived from wavelet decompositions) to perform visual tasks. Some of our work has applications to image processing problems, such as image data compression, video coding, and image denoising.