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. Visual coding refers to the process of designing and implementing representations for the information required to perform visual tasks. Both the biological and computational communities have addressed the task of designing or inferring visual coding strategies. This volume, with chapters by some of the most active contributors in the field of visual coding, describes some of the ingenious mechanisms used to code descriptions of visual phenomena in both areas. These chapters illustrate problems common to both communities and the models and algorithms proposed to solve them. The book includes an introductory overview that sets the later chapters in context.