Interesting facts about snakes' vision

The more I know about vision systems of animals, the more I think that it is advisable to read and study biology and biophysics for specialists in artificial imagery. So the main topic of this post are snakes that have an ability of thermal vision.

Not all of snakes have an ability of heat vision, but some groups of pythons and rattlesnakes can see both in visible and in far-IR band [1]. Snakes use infra-red radiation with wavelengths centred on 10 micrometers (wavelength corresponds to emitted from warmblooded animals). As it was written in [1],

certain groups of snakes do what no other animals or artificial devices can do. They form detailed images of extremely small heat signatures. What is most fascinating is that they do this with receptors that are microscopic in size, extraordinarily sensitive, uncooled, and are able to repair themselves. Snake infra-red imagers are at least 10 times more sensitive than the best artificial infra-red sensors...[1]

Several papers give us better understanding of how snakes can actually see and attack preys using only heat vision. A brief survey of articles devoted to snakes vision as well as some thoughts are given further.

How does the snake see?

The detection system, which consists of cavities located on each side of the head called pit organs, operates on a principle similar to that of a pinhole camera [2]. Pit vipers and boids, the two snake types that possess this ability, have heat-sensitive membranes that can detect the difference in temperature between a moving prey and its surroundings on the scale of mK. If the radiation intensity hitting the membrane at some point is larger than the emitted thermal radiation of the membrane itself, the membrane heats up at that location [2]. The picture of such cavities is presented in Fig. 1.

Figure 1: Snake's heat vision: a) head of a pit viper with nostril, pit hole, and eye, left to right. Photograph courtesy of Guido Westhoff; b) A pit viper's infra-red-sensitive pit organ works like a pinhole camera. The image from the paper [2].

According to the Planck radiation law as an approximation of the emitted heat intensity, 99% of the radiation is emitted at wavelengths under 75 micrometers and the radiation intensity is maximal at 9.5micrometers [3], which is within the 8-12 micrometers IR atmospheric transmittance window [4].

Because the pit hole is very large compared to the membrane size, the radiation strikes many points. Optical quality of the infra-red vision is much too blurry to allow snakes to strike prey with the observed accuracy of about 5 degrees. The most fascinating is an amount of heat-sensitive sensors and their precision:

In pit vipers, which have only two pit holes (one in front of each eye), a block of about 1600 sensory cells lie on a membrane which has a field of view of about 100 degrees . This means the snake's brain would receive an image resolution of about 2.5 degrees for point-like objects, such as eyes, which are one of the hottest points on mammals... [2]

If the aperture was very small, the amount of energy per unit time (second) reaching the membrane would also be small. The need to gather a reasonable amount of thermal energy per second necessitates the ``pinhole'' of the pit organ to be very large, thus greatly reducing its optical performance. If on the other hand the aperture of the organ is large, the image of a point source of heat is disc-shaped rather than point-like. Since, however, the size of the disc-shaped image may be determined by the detectors on the membrane, it is still possible to tell from which direction the radiation comes, ensuring directional sensitivity of the system [3]. The aperture size was probably an evolutionary trade-off between image sharpness and radiant flux [2]. Although the image that is formed on the pit membrane has a very low quality, the information that is needed to reconstruct the original temperature distribution in space is still available [3].

So how a snake could possibly use such poorly focused IR input to find its prey in darkness with a surprising angular precision of 5 degrees? How the snake may be able to extract information on the location of the prey from the blurred image that is formed on the pit-membrane?

What does the snake see?

Without the ability of real-time imaging the IR organ would be of little use for the snake. So Dr. van Hemmen proved that it is possible to reconstruct the original heat distribution using the blurred image on the membrane [3].

The image on the membrane resulting from the total heat distribution in space will be some complicated shape that consists of the superposition of the contributions of all heat sources [3]. A superposition of edge detectors in the brain can now reconstruct the heat distribution by using the whole image on the membrane for each point in space to be reconstructed. So reconstruction is possible because the information is still available in the blurred image on the pit membrane, where the receptors are [2]. As a demonstration of the model, sample image (see Fig. 2) was used.

Figure 2: The famous hare by Durer (left) was converted into 8- bit gray levels at a resolution of 32x32 (right). The image from the paper [2].

Since a snake has limited computational resources (all ``calculations'' must be realizable in neuronal ``hardware'') the reconstruction model must be simple. Our model [5] thus uses only one computational step (it is noniterative) to estimate the input image from the measured response on the pit membrane. It resembles a Wiener filter and is akin to, but different from, some of the algorithms used in image reconstruction [6].

So it is highly remarkable that snakes can perform some kind of an image processing, like our artificial devices based on ``wavefront coding''[7,8] and ``pupil engineering''[9,10] techniques.

Image processing in nature

There was developed a neuronal algorithm [11] that accurately reconstructed the heat image from the membrane. The most vital requirements is accurate detectors and the ability to detect edges in the images produced on the pit membrane [2]. That is similar to the situation with ``wavefront coding'' devices: the dynamic range and accuracy of the ADC is much more important than it is much more important than an amount of elements.

I would like to introduce an analogy here: such imaging is like drawing a picture on a sand. The more fine the sand, the more accurate and delicate pictures one can draw. That is the case of high dynamic range of the detector. And vice versa: on a coarse and stony sand it is difficult to draw a fine tracery that is the case of low dynamic range's detector [12,13].

But let us get back to the model of snakes vision:

The model has a fairly high noise tolerance. For input noise levels up to 50%, the hare is recognizable. Sensitivity to measurement errors is larger. In our calculations, one pixel of the reconstructed image corresponds to about 3 degrees . For detector noise levels up to about 1% of the membrane heat intensity, a good reconstruction is possible, meaning that the edge of the hare may be determined with about one pixel accuracy. At detector noise levels beyond about 1%, the image is not so easily recognizable, but the presence of an object is still evident...[5]

The assumptions that went into the calculations are a ``worst case scenario''. For instance, we assumed [3] that the input to the pit organ is totally uncorrelated, meaning that the snake has no idea what heat distribution to expect. In reality, important information about the environment is always available. For example, typical temperature and size of a prey animal may be encoded in the neuronal processing structure. If the snake ``knows'' what kind of images to expect, the reconstruction process can be enhanced considerably [3].

How does the reconstruction matrix become imprinted on the snake's neural circuitry in the first place? ``It can't be genetic coding,'' says van Hemmen. ``The snake would need a suitcase full of genes to encode such detail. Besides we know that snakes ...need a season of actual learning, not just anatomical maturation, to acquire their extraordinary skills.''... [11]

On the Fig. 3 it is shown a deconvolution results that give us a concept of the snakes vision capabilities.

Figure 3: On the left, this figure displays the membrane heat intensity as captured by the ``pithole camera''. On the right are reconstructions for four different membrane noise levels. The pit membrane was taken as a flat square containing 41x41 receptors. The model works equally well if applied to other membrane shapes. The membrane noise term was taken to be Gaussian with SIGMA= 25, 100, 200, and 500 from left to right and top to bottom, corresponding to 0.25%, 1%, 2%, and 5% of the maximal membrane intensity. The image from the paper [2]

Ultimately, a snake's ability to utilize information from the pit organs depends on its capability to detect edges in the image produced on the pit membrane. If the snake performed no reconstruction, but instead simply targeted bloblike ``hot spots'' on the membrane, it would still have to be able to discern the edge of the blob. The present model performs edge detection for all spatial positions and hence automatically creates a full reconstruction. A level of neuronal processing beyond what is represented in our model is unlikely to be beneficial since the quality of the system is fundamentally limited by the relatively small number of heat receptors.[5]

Conclusion

Snakes' heat vision presents such a clear image when reconstructed that it surpasses even many human devices - it is far better than any technical uncooled infra-red camera with a similar number of detector cells [2].

Bibliography

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Liz Tottenham.
Infrared imaging research targets 'snake vision'.
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Snakes' heat vision enables accurate attacks on prey.
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3

Andreas B. Sichert, Paul Friedel, and J. Leo van Hemmen.
Modelling imaging performance of snake infrared sense.
In Proceedings of the 13th Congress of the Societas Europaea Herpetologica. pp. 219-223; M. Vences, J. Kohler, T. Ziegler, W. Bohme (eds): Herpetologia Bonnensis II., 2006.

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David A. Allen.
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5

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Snake's perspective on heat: Reconstruction of input using an imperfect detection system.
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, PRL 97:068105, 2006.

6

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11

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