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Geoffrey Owen research profile: Compressing the world
05 June 2002

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations

Berkeley — Geoffrey Owen, new dean of the biological sciences at UC Berkeley, came to biology through physics and optics, and never lost his physical intuition. This perspective stood him in good stead as he modeled how the eye works, and has led him to a real-world application — a way to compress video for streaming through the web that is many times better than current methods.

  Paul LuddenCredit: ViaSense, Inc.
 

Born in 1942 in Bristol, England, during the blitz, Owen moved to London with his parents at the end of the war and grew up in west London. He received his B.Sc. in physics in 1965 and his PhD in applied optics in 1970 from the University of London.

His interest in optics was fueled by an interest in photography and art, but he soon realized that optical design was being overtaken by computer automation, becoming more of a technology than a science. In an effort to change fields, he moved to the United States in 1970 with his new American wife, Julie Elizabeth Tarloff, to work as a post-doc at the Jules Stein Eye Institute in Los Angeles.

After a further post-doctoral stint at UC San Francisco, he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, spent two years as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge in England, and finally settled in as a biophysicist and assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1980. It was in Berkeley that he and his wife raised their two children, a daughter who now is a senior at UC Berkeley, and a son who will be a freshman at UC Davis in the fall.

Ironically, it was only in 1998 that he obtained a degree in biology, when the University of London awarded him a Doctor of Science degree for distinguished research in neurophysiology and biophysics.

Much of Owen's biophysics research centers around the photoreceptors in the retina, which are the cells that absorb light, providing input to the other cells of the retina and the brain, where the visual world is interpreted.

His background in physics and optics gave him an unusual perspective, starting with the realization that the process of light detection is not continuous. Light is composed of photons that are absorbed by the photoreceptor in a partially random way that the retina and brain must interpret correctly in order to generate a reliable perception. Using tools from the field of estimation theory, he and colleague Sean McCarthy, PhD, described the response of the retina mathematically, and by comparing this with data from electrical recording from photoreceptors and other retinal cells, were able to tease out how the retina deals with the stochastic nature of the visual image.

In particular, they discovered how retinal cells identify and emphasize what is perceptually important in an image and, in the process, compress the data for transmission to the brain. They also found a basis for the brain's ability to define visual objects and treat them as separate elements of an image.

The image-processing principles Owen and his colleagues discovered led to two patents and the founding of a company, ViaSense, Inc., of Emeryville, to exploit nature's solution in the compression of photos and video. So far, he says, the software his company has developed, dubbed IPeG, can compress still and video images two to four times better than any other available technology while preserving the same quality. He hopes it will find use in transmitting DVD-quality video through the internet, adapting itself automatically to the size of the pipeline the bandwidth available.

With the recent completion of the laboratory phase of his research, he plans to close down his lab and concentrate more on theory and other, more philosophical questions, he said.

"I think sensory systems in general may use the same principles" we've discovered for the retina, he said. "I'm now planning to see if the theory applies to the auditory system, which is able to pick out the sound of a bell from the din just as easily as our eyes pick out a familiar face from the crowd."

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