ISETBIO Baseball Simulation Experiment

Introduction

Hitting a pitched baseball places extreme demands on the visual system. In the few hundred milliseconds between release and home plate, a batter must detect the ball, track its motion, and judge its future location well enough to decide whether and where to swing. Understanding what information is actually available at the level of the eye before any higher-level processing can provide useful insight into how difficult different pitches are to track and discriminate.

For this project, we explore how different baseball pitch trajectories drive cone responses over time in a simplified model of the batter’s eye. We start from rendered synthetic image sequences of pitched balls and use ISETCam to model the optical image at the retina under controlled field-of-view and display conditions. We then use ISETBio’s cone mosaic framework to compute noise-free cone absorptions over time as the ball travels from release to home plate, summarizing responses in foveal, mid-peripheral, and far-peripheral regions. Finally, we analyze these cone absorption sequences to see how well they do with pitch classification and understand their relationship to pitch characteristics.