Bad Design and Good Performance: Strategies of the Visual System for Enhanced Scene Analysis

The visual system of vertebrates is a highly efficient, dynamic scene-analysis machine even though many aspects of its own design are at a first glance rather inconvenient from the viewpoint of an neural network- or computer vision engineer. For several of these apparently imperfect design principles, it seems, however, that the system is able to turn things around and instead make a virtue out of them.