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There is obviously a limit to what the human body can process, such as frames per second. My question is how many MegaPixels would it take before the human eye can no longer differentiate it from life?
Bonus for including an answer for other species.
Question about thing like frame rate, resolution or dynamic range of the human eye and how they compare to cameras always have the same problems:
The "picture" you see isn't a "single exposure", the eye is constantly moving and adjusting.
The part of tee brain that handles vision is really good (and pretty big), it constantly combines the "frames" is gets from the eye and fill in the blanks.
Basically, every image you see with your eyes is an HDR panorama that was fixed with content aware fill (and just like with a camera, when you get into HDR panoramas you can make them at any arbitrarily high resolution and DR)
Also, the eye/brain actually only works on the part of the scene you are concentrating on, you get amazingly high resolution for the tiny part of the world you are thinking about right now - for the rest of the scene you don't really "see" it at all, you only really have to notice things if there's anything dangerous heading your way (that is why movement at the sides is so distracting).
If you look at the specifications of the human eye as if it's a camera, you're going to find it's pretty low-specced.
Very low resolution in terms of pixels - very few megapixels - with most pixels concentrated in a very small area in the centre. Virtually no ability to distinguish fine detail outside of a small area in the centre of the frame.
Horrible extreme chromatic aberration, spherical aberration and noise.
Minimum and maximum focusing distance deteriorates with age, and a lot of models have defects from the factory.
However, the reason none of this counts is that measuring the eye as if it's a camera doesn't make sense: The image we see is created by our brain, which flawlessly and continuously stitches together countless images taken by our eyes and processes them.
Whereas the eye only has a very small area in the centre of our vision that has any real ability to discern detail, the brain has a motor mechanism that swivels the eye around in order to take hundreds of quick samples of the image one after the other, then assembles this into one big picture (with three dimensions, and motion!).
You would need hundreds of megapixels of resolution and a virtually flawless lens to replicate the composite image that the brain assembles, even though the eye in isolation is nowhere near capable of anything this good.
How many "pixels" the human eye captures does not really answer the question. It only equates when, say, the picture you've taken with a camera is blown up to be big enough to consume the viewer's entire visual field. At that size, the original photo would have needed to be approximately 576 Mp.
Detail for a picture is usually measured in DPI (dots per inch), and, even then, the size and distance from the viewer have to be fixed in order to determine how dense the dots have to be for the human eye to no longer be able to tell they are dots.
High quality print made for the average reading distance (18-24 in.) is on the order of 5-10K DPI. For a 1 inch square picture (@10K) that is 100 Mp right there ... for a 1x1 inch picture.
The problem is that even though a general scene may only need 576 Mp, when the eye actually focuses on a specific region, all of its acuity comes to bear on that region. Thus a 1x1 inch picture needs to be much higher density to "fool" the eye.
To make a picture big enough, and yet detailed enough to be focused in on, well, the number of MegaPixels is huge. That's why you see glasses being used. The screen is much closer to the eye, thus making the picture denser and yet appear larger.
Say you have a 5 MP camera. That's roughly 2,200 x 2,200 pixels. If the sensor (CCD) is roughly 1 in x 1 in, that is ... you guessed it 2,200 DPI.
Now blow that up to an 8 in x 8 in photo, and it is only 275 DPI. Nowhere near the 5000 DPI you need for a high quality print. (however, if you look at it from 8 times as far away ... )
To be honest, 2K DPI is passable for a standard print (@ reading distance), and when viewing a photo on a small screen (or print) it looks much more "real".
To get a 4x5 @ 5K DPI you'd need 500 Mp. @ 2K you still would need 80 Mp. Roughly speaking, a 24 Mp (CCD) camera is equivalent to 35mm film quality.
Of course, there are a lot of enhancement techniques you can use to "fill in" the missing density when you have a digital image.
But if you need big pictures, old fashion film can be made in much larger sizes than CCDs can ( 8in X 10in film for example: http://answers.yahoo.com/question )/index?qid=20061123192628AANDiGx )
The number 576MP, which is derived at Roger Clark's site here, is an EXTREMELY ROUGH APPROXIMATION. For one, it is a conservative estimate given a 120º FOV, when human vision is closer to 180º (which actually clocks in at 1.3 GIGAPIXELS!!!) It also ignores the fact that we have a 2º "foveal spot" near the center of our eyes where our acuity is highest, and a wider 10º region where our vision is decent, but not really "good" and certainly not excellent (as a quick test...see how much of the text in this answer is actually fully clear, and how much is actually indistinct and unreadable when looking at exactly the same spot for a period of time...you might be surprised at how much of your screen you cannot actually analyze in any real meaningful detail.) At the periphery of our vision, acuity is fairly low, lacks color fidelity, etc.
In my opinion, I don't believe it is valid to even describe human vision in terms of megapixels. I have great respect for Roger Clark, however his article needs to be taken in the right light: It assumes maximum visual acuity across the entire field of vision! The critical fact here is that our maximum visual acuity only affects a small region of the central portion of our vision. A region that probably doesn't even cover a single 8x10" print viewed a foot away...which requires less than 9 megapixels (3330x2664 pixels) to print at 333ppi (the required resolution for a one-foot viewing distance.)
One would theoretically require fewer and fewer megapixels to continue printing rings of 8x10" prints circling a central one to fill the entire human field of view. From a real-world acuity standpoint, one probably needs 1/3rd fewer megapixels per "ring" of prints (rough guess), and maybe four rings of prints to entirely fill the field of view "corner to corner". That clocks in at less than 85 megapixels all told!
That said...I still do not believe it is accurate or useful to try and describe human visual acuity in terms of megapixels. We have varying acuity from the center to the edge of our visual field of view, with rapid falloff outside of perhaps a 4-5º central high acuity region.
Overview.
A very difficult, but interesting question. There is one key thing before we get started. The brain instantly deletes unneeded info amongst other super intensive processing and focuses on stuff thats worth remembering. What you 'see' is not accurate of the eye's technical ability. But as for its technical ability; there are a range of estimates, from 5 to over 500 megapixels.
Note: None of these calculations are scientifically accepted.
Human Eyes.
A human with 20/20 vision, is able to resolve the equivalent of about 52 megapixel camera (assuming a 60° angle of view). This is based on each rod and cone cell being able to represent a megapixel. There are about 7 million cones (need high light levels and provide colour) and 120 million rods (work in low light, don't output colour, not always activated). Together these work to create somewhere between 50-500MP. (REALLY appoximately!). Less conservative estimates claim 500+ million megapixels.
None of these articles have been peer reviewed, so there is no scientific viability to any of these ideas. The 567MP estimate does not assume a still image. It takes into account tiny angular vibrations that the eyes do to gather more information. The estimate also takes into account a wider field of view (120˚)(hence it has more MP than there are photoreceptors).
This article disputes those high estimates and says "such calculations are misleading". Amongst things like low light and there not being a shutter speed, the most notable difference in a picture vs your eyesight is derived from the way your eyes focus on something.
Only the central vision is 20/20. The overall image is pretty pants away from the center. Just 20° off-center our eyes resolve only one-tenth as much detail. At the periphery, we only detect large-scale contrast and minimal color. Based on this a single glance of the eyes is therefore only capable of perceiving detail comparable to a 5-15 megapixel camera (depending on one's eyesight). The eye needs to therefor glance several times and even then only the memorable textures, colours and shapes will be remembered.
Other animals.
Hawk. This is probably what people will be most familiar with as an eagle eyed bird of prey. They have around 5 times greater density of photoreceptors than we do, so lets say they have a quarter of a gigapixel (250 MP-5.5GP). What's better about these guys than us is that they have way more nerves going to the brain than we do. There is no sure way of saying that indicates a better resolution, but it indicates more information is being relayed to the brain from their eyes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk#Eyesight
Mantis Shrimp. We have 3 types of colour photoreceptors (cone cells). Scientists have identified 16 colour receptors in mantis shrimp. Obviously this is beyond our minds comprehension. Furthermore this has nothing to do with resolution, but the colour depth those guys have is phenomenal.
You should probably not ask about megapixels, human eye is a complex system, not only the "matrix". You should better ask about range of angular resolutions.
Look for it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution
Angular resolution: about 4 arcminutes, or approximately 0.07°,[1] which corresponds to 1.2 m at a 1 km distance.
From what I read, I believe when discussing the ultimate resolving power of the eye, you need to consider that fovea is the only part of the retina able to distinguish the fine detail. The size of this region on our retina is quite small requiring us to constantly adjust our eyes to allow the “subject” to fall on this area. In fact it is so small that even when concentrating on a small object, we must scan over it, we can’t resolve the details of even a small object at one time. How large an area can we resolve with maximum clarity without darting our eyes about? That area has a diameter of about the distance between the two dots of a colon read at a normal reading distance.
Regarding frames per second, I believe the equivalence for humans is 1/10 of a second. Try an experiment – while stopped at a light, notice how the details of alloy wheels on the cars crossing your path are a blur. While following one with your eyes, tap (not whack) the side of your head at the temple. This will jar your eyes and sometimes, for the briefest moment, your eyes will “pan” with a portion of the wheel which will reveal its details.
Simple answer to this question would be 2 megapixels. I mean it. Here is a scientific explanation to that MindLabs.
Human eye does not see well at all. When focusing close we are really selective that it may equal to f1. The 99% of the scene is too blurred.
We also have a blind spot which is explained in the link above.
Also we can't freeze any scene, which can't be comparable to even a cheapest camera.
To sum it up, our eye suck, but our brains compensate too well that we all believe we are better that every camera out n the market.
576 megapixels - that is according to an article by scientist and photographer Roger Clark, which also tells more about human eye and its equivalences to digital technology...
There are about 120 million rods and about 6 million cones, so the maximum theoretical human eye resolution (considering perfect optical light transmission in the retina) should be around the figure of 2 megapixels (it takes 3 cones for an RGB triplet) with a really high dynamic range in the peripheral areas (that's what the rods are for).
