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acquisition. This later broadened to include ground -to-air acquisition and vision via a
variety of visual aids (telescopic sights, TV displays, thermal imagers, image intensifiers
etc.). In those studies he was supported directly by a team of some 15 physicists,
engineers and support staff, while receiving indirect support from a growing human
factors team of ergonomists and psychologists carrying out related studies.
In the late 1960's, as a result of difficulties experienced in fitting field trials data to
existing models of visual threshold performance, major interest in optical image
evaluation and modelling of visual processes began to develop. These interests
continued and expanded during subsequent years.
In 1972 he was appointed Chief Optics Engineer at the Bristol factory of the then British
Aircraft Corporation (Guided Weapons Division). This post was essentially a
consultancy position, in order that he could spend most of his time continuing day to day
research. During the early 1970's this research led to the formulation & refinement of a multi-parametric mathematical model of the thresholds of human visual performance for simple objects which subsequently became known by the code name ORACLE.
In the mid 1970's he was invited to attempt to set up a computer simulation of the early neural networks, to help understanding of visual performance when viewing highly structured scenes, as opposed to simple objects. In the 1980's this led to the development of a high fidelity, unified approach to early computer vision which has performance limits very closely
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