The consequent analysis of the prenatal development of the human eye covers three components of the hardware of the visual organ: the imaging optics, the cellular gratings on the optical surfaces (in particular the retina's three nuclear layers), as well as the visual pathway from the eye to the brain. A radical new interpretation of the nuclear layers of the 'inverted' retina as optical phase gratings and space gratings and the interaction of all hardware components results in a new

more »

... ng of the decisive optical pre-processing functionalities of the individual eye: the grating- optical spatial frequency filtering, the three-dimensional image processing based on the Fresnel near- field interferences dependent on the focal position of images, the (log)polar invariant information processing in object classification and identification, as well as the diffractive-optical RGB trichromatics in the cellular space lattice (ONL grating of the retina). With the multi-layered processing, the inverted retina becomes the decisive missing link between optical imaging and multilayer information processing in the cortical visual centers CGL and V1.