Abstract

Vision, as a symphony of physics and intelligence, encompasses two interconnected dimensions: sensing and perception. Visual sensing, grounded in physical optics, harnesses computational intelligence to enhance light capture. Visual perception, driven by intelligence, is now empowered by physical optics to interpret visual data with greater efficiency. This talk begins with light field meta-imaging achieving aberration-corrected sensing across a 1,100 arcseconds field-of-view on an 80-cm ground-based telescope, demonstrating how computational intelligence enhances visual sensing. It then explores photonic-domain neural networks, illustrating how physical optics synergistically advances visual perception. Together, these innovations tend to dissolve the boundaries between sensing and perception, paving the way for a neuromorphic ‘senception’ embodied vision across diverse fields such as astronomy, smart cities, and autonomous systems.