Modelling imaging performance of snake infrared sense
Publication Type: |
Conference Proceedings |
Year of Publication: |
2006 |
Authors: |
Andreas B. Sichert, Paul Friedel, J. Leo van Hemmen |
Publication/Journal: |
Proceedings of the 13th Congress of the Societas Europaea Herpetologica |
Publisher: |
Herpetologia Bonnensis II |
Keywords: |
conference, infrared-sensitive pit organ, prey, sensory, snake, thermal energy |
Abstract:
Several snake species use infrared-sensitive pit organs to localise prey. These sensory organs enable the snake to successfully strike prey items even in total darkness or following the disruption of other sensory systems. The pit organ has traditionally been thought to function as a pinhole camera. The need, however, to gather a reasonable amount of thermal energy per time unit (second) necessitates the “pinhole” of the pit organ to be very large, thus greatly reducing its optical performance. 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. In this paper, we present an explicit mathematical model that allows the original heat distribution to be reconstructed from the low-quality image on the membrane.