Introduction
The purpose of this book is to describe the
optical structure and optical properties of the
human eye. It will be useful to those who have
an interest in vision, such as optometrists,
ophthalmologists, vision scientists, optical
physicists, and students of visual optics. An
understanding of the optics of the human eye
is particularly important to designers of
ophthalmic diagnostic equipment and visual
optical systems such as telescopes.
Most animals have some sort of eye
structure or sophisticated light sense. Like
humans, some rely heavily on vision, includ-
ing predatory birds and insects such as
honeybees and dragonflies. However, many
animals rely much more on other senses,
particularly hearing and smell, than on vision.
The visual sense is very complex and is able to
process huge amounts of information very
rapidly. How this is done is not fully under-
stood; it requires greater knowledge of how
the neural components of vision (retina,
visual cortex, and other brain centres) process
the retinal image. However, the first stage in
this complex process is the formation of the
retinal image. In this text, we investigate how
the image is formed and discuss factors that
affect its quality.
The majority of animal eyes can be divided
into two groups: compound eyes (as pos-
sessed by most insects), and vertebrate eyes
(such as the human eye). Compared with
vertebrate eyes, there is considerable variation
in the compound eyes. Compound eyes
contain a large number of optical elements
(ommatidia), each with its own aperture to the
external world. Vertebrate eyes have a single
aperture to the external world, which is used
by all the detectors. A number of other
animals have simple eyes, which can be
described as less developed versions of the
vertebrate eye. All eyes, of whatever type,
involve compromises between the need for
detection (sensitivity), particularly at low
light levels, and spatial resolving capability in
terms of the direction or form of an object.
Although this book is about the optics of
the human eye we do not wish to consider the
optics in complete isolation from the neural
components, as otherwise we cannot appre-
ciate what influence changes in the retinal
image will have on vision performance. As an
example, altering the optics has considerable
influence on resolution of objects for central
vision but not for peripheral vision. This is
because the retina's neural structure is fine
enough at its centre, but not in the periphery,
for large changes in optical quality to be of
importance (Chapter 18). Thus, the neural
components of the visual system, particularly
the retinal detector, rate some mention in the
book. The neural structures of the retina
themselves produce optical effects. As an
example, the photoreceptors exhibit wave-
guide properties that make light arriving from
some directions more efficient at stimulating
vision than light arriving from other direc-
tions. Another example is that the regular
arrangement of the nerve fibre layers pro-
duces polarization effects.
While image formation in the eye is similar
to that in man-made optical systems such as
xii Introduction
cameras and must obey the conventional
optical laws, there are some interesting
differences because of the eye's biological
basis. Perhaps the greatest difference is that,
as a living organ, the eye responds to its
environment, often in an attempt to give the
best image under different circumstances.
Also, it grows, ages and suffers disease.
Unlike most man-made optical systems, the
eye is not rotationally symmetrical about a
single axis, and different axes must be used to
define image formation.
There are many interesting and important
optical effects associated with ocular diseases
such as keratoconus (conical cornea) and
cataract. Furthermore, the balance between
optical and neural contributions to overall
vision performance changes with diseases of
the retina and beyond. Although there are
some passing references to cataract, we have
concentrated on the healthy human eye. We
give some prominence to age-related changes
in the optics of the eye throughout the book,
and devote Chapter 20 to this topic.
To make the book easy to read it is divided
into a number of short chapters, with each
chapter dedicated to a single theme. The most
commonly useful topics are at the beginning,
and topics with narrower appeal (such as
ocular aberrations) are placed towards the
end. Section 1 covers the basic optical
structure of the human eye, including the
refracting components, the pupil, axes and
simple models of the eye. Section 2 is about
image formation and refraction of the eye.
This includes the refractive errors of the eye,
their measurement and correction, and
paraxial treatments of focused and defocused
image sizes and positions. Section 3 deals
with the interactions between light and the
eye, considering transmission, reflection and
scatter in the media of the eye and at the
fundus. Section 4 deals with aberrations and
retinal image quality. As well as considering
these for real eyes, it covers the modelling of
eyes and the performance of a range of
schematic eyes of different levels of
sophistication. Section 5 considers the topics
of depth-of-field and age-related changes in
the optics of the eye. While depth-of-field
effects could possibly have been placed earlier
in the book, understanding them well requires
some knowledge about aberration and
diffraction. The book concludes with 4
appendices, three of which (Appendices 1, 2
and 4) cover some mathematics relating to
paraxial optics, aberrations theory and image
quality criteria. Appendix 3 lists construction
data, optical parameters and the aberrations
of a number of schematic eyes.