I agree with your general point that working on lossless compression requires the researcher to pay attention to details that most people would consider meaningless or irrelevant. In my own text compression work, I have to pay a lot of attention to things like capitalization, comma placement, the difference between Unicode quote characters, etc etc. However, I have three responses to this as a critique of the research program:
The first response is to say that nothing is truly irrelevant. Or, equivalently, the vision system should not attempt to make the relevance distinction. Details that are irrelevant in everyday tasks might suddenly become very relevant in a crime scene investigation (where did this shadow at the edge of the image come from...?). Also, even if a detail is irrelevant at the top level, it might be relevant in the interpretation process; certainly shadowing is very important in the human visual system.
The second response is that while it is difficult and time-consuming to worry about details, this is a small price to pay for the overall goal of objectivity and methodological rigor. Human science has always required a large amount of tedious lab work and unglamorous experimental work.
The third response is to say that even if some phenomenon is considered irrelevant by “end users”, scientists are interested in understanding reality for its own sake, not for the sake of applications. So pure vision scientists should be very interested in, say, categorizing textures, modeling shadows and lighting, and lens artifacts (Actually, in my interactions with computer graphics people, I have found this exact tendency).
I agree with your general point that working on lossless compression requires the researcher to pay attention to details that most people would consider meaningless or irrelevant. In my own text compression work, I have to pay a lot of attention to things like capitalization, comma placement, the difference between Unicode quote characters, etc etc. However, I have three responses to this as a critique of the research program:
The first response is to say that nothing is truly irrelevant. Or, equivalently, the vision system should not attempt to make the relevance distinction. Details that are irrelevant in everyday tasks might suddenly become very relevant in a crime scene investigation (where did this shadow at the edge of the image come from...?). Also, even if a detail is irrelevant at the top level, it might be relevant in the interpretation process; certainly shadowing is very important in the human visual system.
The second response is that while it is difficult and time-consuming to worry about details, this is a small price to pay for the overall goal of objectivity and methodological rigor. Human science has always required a large amount of tedious lab work and unglamorous experimental work.
The third response is to say that even if some phenomenon is considered irrelevant by “end users”, scientists are interested in understanding reality for its own sake, not for the sake of applications. So pure vision scientists should be very interested in, say, categorizing textures, modeling shadows and lighting, and lens artifacts (Actually, in my interactions with computer graphics people, I have found this exact tendency).