Prof. Martin Banks, University of California, Berkeley gave a distinguished lecture on Picture Perception on 13 November.

He spoke about his lab’s work on picture perception, specifically providing insights to the perceptual bases and its importance in photography.  He explained this concept with three main photographic effects – wide angle distortion, depth compression/expansion and depth of field effects. All these were demonstrated with experiments conducted in his lab to test for the accommodations/adaptation the human visual system applies. Interesting experiments include determination  of the preferred viewing distance to a display, blur as cues to absolute distance and how aperture is adjusted to reduce blur and increase the scale of the object.

Prof. Martin Banks teaches and conducts research work in optometry and vision sciences at the University of California, Berkeley since 1985. His research focuses on human visual development and visual space perception and publications (over a 100) cover understanding infants visual perception, multi-modal sensory information processing and recently on evaluation of virtual display and augmented reality.

Prof. Martin Banks received several awards and recognitions like: Charles F Prentice Medal, American Academy of Optometry, Henry B Peters Lecture, UC Berkeley School of Optometry, Borish Scholar, Indiana University School of Optometry, Honorary Professor, University of Wales, Otto Schade Prize, Society for Information Display,  from Society for Information Display and the Edgar Tillyer Award from the Optical Society of America.