[gumby]

That's actually not at all how the eye works. We saccade a tiny spot around the scene based on our semantic intent (it's how, for example, you can see a hole to the sunny outside from inside a cave, while no camera will be able to manage the white balance). Then we have specific hardware doing feature extraction in the early visual system and feeding into the vision process.

Finally the semantic interpretation feeds deeply into the vision system. For example, though we have binocular vision you can only get stereopsis via parallax basically as far as you can reach -- after that you use semantic clues in the scene to understand that a barn is bigger than a person so that the person must be closer.