David Marr

David Courtenay Marr (1945 to 1980) was a British neuroscientist and cognitive scientist whose computational approach to vision helped found the field of computational neuroscience and shaped computer vision as a discipline. He proposed that understanding vision requires understanding it at three distinct levels, the computational, algorithmic and implementational, an approach now known as Marr's tri level hypothesis, and described visual processing as proceeding through stages he called the primal sketch, the 2.5D sketch and a 3D model representation. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1966 and completing his PhD there in 1969, before joining the psychology department at MIT, where he was granted a tenured full professorship in 1980, having earlier published influential theoretical work on the cerebellum, neocortex and hippocampus. His book 'Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information,' published posthumously in 1982, became a foundational text of computational vision. He died of leukemia at age 35.