David Marr's Vision is jammed with information about what it means to see, both technically and philosophically; it lucidly reports the last ten years of research into the human visual system from the multi-disciplinary perspective of Marr and his colleagues. Workers in human vision tended to have either a neuro-physiological background (as Marr had), or a psychophysical one. In the early seventies Marr reached the conclusion that such disciplines helped to describe rather than explain the behaviour of neural cells or of subjects. He moved to the MIT artificial intelligence lab in 1973, in the hope that, by trying to build an artificial vision system, the fundamental engineering reasons for the structure of the human visual system could be discovered.
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/review-of-reviews-vision-by-david-marr-san-franclsco-wh-freeman-1982-JBRbQ0p9J8