title: Completing visual contours: the relationship between relatability and minimizing inflections.
abstract: Visual completion is a ubiquitous phenomenon: Human vision often constructs contours and surfaces in regions that have no sharp gradients in any image property. When does human vision interpolate a contour between a given pair of luminance-defined edges? Two different answers have been proposed: relatability and minimizing inflections. We state and prove a proposition that links these two proposals by showing that, under appropriate conditions, relatability is mathematically equivalent to the existence of a smooth curve with no inflection points that interpolates between the two edges. The proposition thus provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for two edges to be relatable. On the basis of these conditions, we suggest a way to extend the definition of relatability (1) to include the role of genericity, and (2) to extend the current all-or-none character of relatability to a graded measure that can track the gradedness in psychophysical data.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Irvine, USA. manish@psyche.mit.edu
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.forename: D D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Hoffman
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D011601:Psychophysics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*