Artificial Bee Eye Gives Insight Into Insects’ Visual World

[The Straight Story]

Artificial Bee Eye Gives Insight Into Insects’ Visual World

ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2010) — Despite their tiny brains, bees have remarkable navigation capabilities based on their vision. Now scientists have recreated a light-weight imaging system mimicking a honeybee's field of view, which could change the way we build mobile robots and small flying vehicles.

New research published Aug. 6 in IOP Publishing's Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, describes how the researchers from the Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' at Bielefeld University, Germany, have built an artificial bee eye, complete with fully functional camera, to shed light on the insects' complex sensing, processing and navigational skills.

Consisting of a light-weight mirror-lens combination attached to a USB video camera, the artificial eye manages to achieve a field of vision comparable to that of a bee. In combining a curved reflective surface that is built into acrylic glass with lenses covering the frontal field, the bee eye camera has allowed the researchers to take unique images showing the world from an insect's viewpoint.

In the future, the researchers hope to include UV to fully reflect a bee's colour vision, which is important to honeybees for flower recognition and discrimination and also polarisation vision, which bees use for orientation. They also hope to incorporate models of the subsequent neural processing stages.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100805203343.htm

[mike_c]

1. there's a vital component missing from this, however...

...and that's the bee's nervous system, and in particular it's protocerebrum.

Although this specific model is new, there have been others in recent years that take a similar approach. Since an insect's compound eyes are composed of individual visual units called ommatidia and each ommatidium has its own visual axis, lens system, and it's own wavelength specific responses to light reception, insect vision can be modeled as a series of individual pixel recording cameras wrapped around a semi-spherical object. That's the part I don't have any quibble with. It's cool.

What it doesn't give us ANY hint about, however, is what an insect sees. This model tells us what sort of visual input a bee likely experiences, but what it sees has relatively little to do with its eyes and much more to do with how its nervous system interprets visual signals. Remember, like humans and all other animals, bees do not receive "images" from their eyes-- we receive coded signals DENSELY packed into nerve fibers, and all the signals are equivalent, i.e. they are not qualitatively different from one another no matter what information they're carrying. The signal for "red object" is no different than the signal for "green object." They literally cannot be distinguished from one another without additional knowledge about where they originated and where they're received within the visual cortex. Our understanding of the difference arises in our brains, and the same is true for bees. The information stream passing down the optic nerves is nothing more than a complicated series of superimposed binary responses to light reception-- ons and offs-- that are completely divorced from the process of seeing, per se. It's only after that information is interpreted that we-- and bees-- construct a visual model of the world INTERNALLY, within our central nervous systems.

There is no a priori reason to suspect that bees see the world any differently than we do-- nor is there any real reason to suspect the opposite, at least not based models of their input systems like that in the OP. As long as they contain information about the wavelengths reflected and the spatial relationships of objects, no matter how distorted, that information could be interpreted to construct a world model exactly like our own-- or it could be used to construct one that is very different. Remember, when we look at pics like the one in the OP, we're interpreting modeled visual inputs from an insect's compound eyes in our own visual cortex, applying our own interpretive models to input that is mechanically different from our own, and thus we "see" something odd and unaccustomed. There is no reason at all to think that bees see anything like that image when they interpret the data themselves.