Book excerpt: All visual tasks, from the simplest computer graphics program to the most complex biological visual system, require an underlying representation of visual information. The structure or coding of this representation provides the framework for processing the information. Both the biological and computational communities have had to address the task of designing or inferring visual coding strategies. This volume, by some of the most active contributors in the field of visual coding, describes some of the mechanisms used to code descriptions of visual phenomena in both areas. These chapters illustrate the similarities in the problems considered and the common models and algorithms that are proposed to solve them. The book includes an overview that sets the later chapters in context. Researchers in neuroscience and computational vision will find a wealth of new ideas here.