Visual perception is the ability to detect light and use it to form an image of the surrounding environment. Photodetection without image formation is classified as light sensing. In most vertebrates, visual perception can be enabled by photopic vision (daytime vision) or scotopic vision (night vision), with most vertebrates having both. Visual perception detects light (photons) in the visible spectrum reflected by objects in the environment or emitted by light sources. The visible range of light is defined by what is readily perceptible to humans, though the visual perception of non-humans often extends beyond the visual spectrum. The resulting perception is also known as vision, sight, or eyesight (adjectives visual, optical, and ocular, respectively). The various physiological components involved in vision are referred to collectively as the visual system, and are the focus of much research in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and molecular biology, collectively referred to as vision science.

Most vertebrates achieve vision through similar visual systems. Generally, light enters the eye through the cornea and is focused by the lens onto the retina, a light-sensitive membrane at the back of the eye. Specialized photoreceptive cells in the retina act as transducers, converting the light into neural impulses. The photoreceptors are broadly classed into cone cells and rod cells, which enable photopic and scotopic vision, respectively. These photoreceptors' signals are transmitted by the optic nerve, from the retina upstream to central ganglia in the brain. The lateral geniculate nucleus, which transmits the information to the visual cortex. Signals from the retina also travel directly from the retina to the superior colliculus.

The lateral geniculate nucleus sends signals to the primary visual cortex, also called striate cortex. Extrastriate cortex, also called visual association cortex is a set of cortical structures, that receive information from striate cortex, as well as each other. Recent descriptions of visual association cortex describe a division into two functional pathways, a ventral and a dorsal pathway. This conjecture is known as the two streams hypothesis.

The major problem in visual perception is that what people see is not simply a translation of retinal stimuli (i.e., the image on the retina), with the brain altering the basic information taken in. Thus people interested in perception have long struggled to explain what visual processing does to create what is actually seen.

There were two major ancient Greek schools, providing a primitive explanation of how vision works.

The first was the "emission theory" of vision which maintained that vision occurs when rays emanate from the eyes and are intercepted by visual objects. If an object was seen directly it was by 'means of rays' coming out of the eyes and again falling on the object. A refracted image was, however, seen by 'means of rays' as well, which came out of the eyes, traversed through the air, and after refraction, fell on the visible object which was sighted as the result of the movement of the rays from the eye. This theory was championed by scholars who were followers of Euclid's Optics and Ptolemy's Optics.

The second school advocated the so-called 'intromission' approach which sees vision as coming from something entering the eyes representative of the object. With its main propagator Aristotle (De Sensu), and his followers, this theory seems to have some contact with modern theories of what vision really is, but it remained only a speculation lacking any experimental foundation.

The most decisive development of the intromission theory came from the work of the 11th-century scholar Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen). In his Book of Optics (Kitāb al-Manāẓir, c. 1021), he rejected both the extramission theory of Euclid and Ptolemy and the purely speculative account of Aristotle. Through systematic experimentation, he demonstrated that vision occurs when light rays reflected from objects enter the eye, where they are focused by the lens onto the retina. This empirical approach marked a turning point: Alhazen not only provided the first correct explanation of vision in terms of intromission but also introduced experimental methods that influenced later European scholars such as Roger Bacon, Kepler, and eventually Newton.