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.
Credit:
ViaSense, Inc.