This thesis formulates an optimal estimation approach to the common biophysics problem of visual modeling. More specifically, it deals with the encoding problem of biological vision, where, given a stimulus signal, we predict the spike response patterns of the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) that transmit the signal from the retina to the brain. We optimized a modified version of the generalized linear model [2], which we labeled mGLM. Analysis confirmed the model s versatility in capturing a range of cell firing rates and its ability to predict the rate on the 60 Hz scale. The calibrated mGLM...