Publication
A de facto standard approach in solving computer vision tasks is to use a common high-resolution camera and choose its placement on an agent based on human intuition. On the other hand, extremely simple and well-designed visual sensors found throughout nature allow many organisms to exhibit diverse, complex behaviors. In this work, motivated by these examples, we raise the following questions: How effective simple visual sensors are in solving vision tasks?What role does their design play in their effectiveness? How effective simple visual sensors are in solving vision tasks? What role does their design play in their effectiveness? We explore simple sensors with resolutions as low as one-by-one pixel, representing a single photoreceptor. First, we demonstrate that just a few photoreceptors can be enough to solve different vision tasks, such as visual navigation and continuous control, reasonably well, i.e., with the performance significantly better than that of a blind agent and comparable to a high-resolution camera. Second, we show that the design of these simple visual sensors plays a crucial role in their ability to provide useful information and successfully solve these tasks. To find a well-performing design, we present a computational design optimization algorithm and evaluate its effectiveness across different tasks and domains, showing promising results. Finally, we conduct a human survey to evaluate the effectiveness of intuitive designs engineered manually by humans, showing that the computationally found design is among the best designs in most cases.