Bela Julesz

Béla Julesz (also Bela Julesz in English; February 19, 1928 – December 31, 2003) was a Hungarian-born American visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual and auditory perception.

Julesz was the originator of random dot stereograms which led to the creation of autostereograms. He also was the first to study texture discrimination by constraining second-order statistics.

Béla Julesz was born in Budapest, Hungary, on February 19, 1928. He immigrated to the United States with his wife Margit after receiving his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1956. Although Béla is the Hungarian name with the accent. Bela always used the non-accented version.

In 1956, Julesz joined the renowned Bell Laboratories, where he headed the Sensory and Perceptual Processes Department (1964–1982), then the Visual Perception Research Department (1983–1989). Much of his research focused on physiological psychology topics including depth perception and pattern recognition within the visual system.

In 1959, Julesz created the random-dot stereogram using pairs of random dot patterns that were identical except for slight differences in the horizontal position of a subset of dots. When these patterns were viewed one to each eye via a stereoscope, the subset of dots appeared to be at a different depth from the remainder. Julesz referred to this, whimsically, as cyclopean vision, after the mythical Cyclops, a creature with a single eye in its forehead instead of the usual two. This was because the shape of the depth area was invisible to either eye separately; it is visible only to the cyclopean eye of stereoscopic perception that combines the information from the two eyes. Later, Christopher Tyler, a former student of Julesz, used the principles of random-dot stereograms to invent autostereograms, which create the same effect using a single image instead of two.

...
Wikipedia