Horopter

The horopter as a special set of points of single vision was first mentioned in the eleventh century by Ibn al-Haytham, known to the west as "Alhazen". He built on the binocular vision work of Ptolemy and discovered that objects lying on a horizontal line passing through the fixation point resulted in single images, while objects a reasonable distance from this line resulted in double images. Thus Alhazen noticed the importance of some points in the visual field but did not work out the exact shape of the horopter and used singleness of vision as a criterion. The term horopter was introduced by Franciscus Aguilonius in the second of his six books in optics in 1613. In 1818, Gerhard Vieth argued from Euclidean geometry that the horopter must be a circle passing through the fixation-point and the nodal point of the two eyes. A few years later Johannes Müller made a similar conclusion for the horizontal plane containing the fixation point, although he did expect the horopter to be a surface in space (i.e., not restricted to the horizontal plane). The theoretical/geometrical horopter in the horizontal plane became known as the Vieth-Müller circle. However, see the next section Theoretical horopter for the claim that this has been the case of a mistaken identity for about 200 years. In 1838, Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope, allowing him to explore the empirical horopter. He found that there were many points in space that yielded single vision; this is very different from the theoretical horopter, and subsequent authors have similarly found that the empirical horopter deviates from the form expected on the basis of simple geometry. Recently, plausible explanation has been provided to this deviation, showing that the empirical horopter is adapted to the statistics of retinal disparities normally experienced in natural environments. In this way, the visual system is able to optimize its resources to the stimuli that are more likely to be experienced. == Theoretical binocular horopter ==

Later, Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering worked out the exact shape of the horopter almost at the same time. Their descriptions identified two components for the horopter for symmetrical fixation closer than infinity. The first is in the plane which contains the fixation point (wherever it is) and the two nodal points of the eye. Historically the geometric locus of horopteric points in this plane was taken to be a circle (the Vieth-Müller circle) going from one nodal point to the other in space and passing through the fixation point, until Howarth (2011) that Müller's anatomical approximation that the nodal point and eye rotation center are coincident should be refined. Unfortunately, their attempt to correct this assumption was flawed, as demonstrated in Turski (2016). This form was predicted by Helmholtz and subsequently confirmed by Solomons. In the general case that includes the fact that the eyes cyclorotate when viewing above or below the primary horopter circle, the theoretical horopter components of the circle and straight line rotate vertically around the axis of the nodal points of the eyes. == Empirical binocular horopter ==

As Wheatstone (1838) observed, or just '''Panum's area''', although recently that has been taken to mean the area in the horizontal plane, around the Vieth-Müller circle, where any point appears single. These early empirical investigations used the criterion of singleness of vision, or absence of diplopia to determine the horopter. Today the horopter is usually defined by the criterion of identical visual directions (similar in principle to the apparent motion horopter, according that identical visual directions cause no apparent motion). Other criteria used over the years include the apparent fronto-parallel plane horopter, the equi-distance horopter, the drop-test horopter or the plumb-line horopter. Although these various horopters are measured using different techniques and have different theoretical motivations, the shape of the horopter remains identical regardless of the criterion used for its determination. Consistently, the shape of the empirical horopter have been found to deviate from the geometrical horopter. For the horizontal horopter this is called the Hering-Hillebrand deviation. The empirical horopter is flatter than predicted from geometry at short fixation distances and becomes convex for farther fixation distances. Moreover the vertical horopter have been consistently found to have a backward tilt of about 2 degrees relative to its predicted orientation (perpendicular to the fixation plane). The theory underlying these deviations is that the binocular visual system is adapted to the irregularities that can be encountered in natural environments. == Horopter in computer vision ==

In computer vision, the horopter is defined as the curve of points in 3D space having identical coordinate projections with respect to two cameras with the same intrinsic parameters. It is generally a twisted cubic. A twisted cubic can be represented parametrically as x = x(θ), y = y(θ), z = z(θ) where x(θ), y(θ), z(θ) are three independent third-degree polynomials. In some degenerate configurations, the horopter reduces to a conic curve. == References ==