Book excerpt: Perspectives in Computing: Human and Machine Vision II compiles papers presented at the second Workshop on Human and Machine Vision held in Montreal, Canada on August 1-3, 1984. This book discusses the perception of transparency in man and machine, human image understanding, and connectionist models and parallelism in high level vision. The theory of the perceived spatial layout of scenes, generative systems of analyzers, and codon constraints on closed 2D shapes are also elaborated. This text likewise covers the environment- and viewer-centered perception of surface orientation, autonomous scene description with range imagery, and pre-attentive processing in vision. This publication is recommended for students and researchers interested in both fields of visual perception and computer vision.