Is "early vision" chronological or process This might sound silly, but I have a language barrier type of question, and I was hoping someone could clear up this misunderstanding:

I've seen the term "early vision" several times in papers I've read, but the term often doesn't accompany any later publications to compare with when using the term. At first I assumed this was referring the the chronological order of the publications, but the lack of "later vision" makes me, as a newcomer to the field, question whether this is a term to refer to the processing order used in vision - such as "early" in respect to the order of operations used in the image processing. What is the correct interpretation of this term?
I'm pretty sure it means early as in the sorts of things that happen in the first steps of the visual cortex. So things like basic segmentation and shape detection and motion analysis would be early but not higher level reasoning like object recognition.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~tomasi/papers/tomasi/tomasiEcs00.pdf