About Us

The full understanding of human potential is strictly related to the knowledge of our perception of the universe. The senses direct our thoughts by inputting information to the brain allowing us to feel the world around us. Vision is the most complex form of input for the brain, that is why there are many researchers in the world dedicated to the area of Cybernetic Vision, which grows every year. The Institute of Physics at São Carlos (IFSC) is home of the Luciano Costa's Research Group (founded by Luciano da F. Costa), dedicated to the area and unique in Brazil, engaged in this kind of research.

Cybernetic Vision is essentially a fusion between biological vision and artificial vision. Many of the mechanisms and techniques used in the development of computer vision are strongly connected with the operation of natural vision, and have even been used to better understand its internal workings.

Because of the need of a multidisciplinary research panorama, joining together science areas such as Physics, Mathematics, Biology and Computation; methodologies applied in Cybernetic Vision can be broadly used in multiple fields of knowledge. This kind of research already provided relevant discoveries in unrelated areas, from physics to philosophy, considering both theoretical and applied aspects.

An important aspect of vision is its complexity, as well as for each mechanism of human perception. This concept can be extended to a wide range of problems, in fact most of the interesting natural phenomena emerges from the complex interaction between different sub-systems. Thus the need of multidisciplinary studies to understand such systems.

Complex Systems are difficult to study because they cannot be fully understood simply by reducing the problem to simpler isolated systems. The complex structure of some phenomena needs to be dealt by considering the whole range of interactions between sub-systems. Modern studies of Complex Networks have became a powerful way to represent complex systems, revealing rich information and new aspects of some phenomena.

While the main goal of the group was originally the development of theory and applications related to Cybernetic Vision, we followed the natural flow of knowledge evolution to the multidisciplinary aspect of the research which has rendered a broad number of works and publications in a diverse range of science fields.