title: The generic-viewpoint assumption and illusory contours.
abstract: Visual images are ambiguous. Any image, or collection of images, is consistent with an infinite number of possible scenes in the world. Yet we are generally unaware of this ambiguity. During ordinary perception we are generally aware of only one, or perhaps a few of these possibilities. Human vision evidently exploits certain constraints--assumptions about the world and images formed of it--in order to generate its perceptions. One constraint that has been widely studied by researchers in human and machine vision is the generic-viewpoint assumption. We show that this assumption can help to explain the widely discussed fact that outlines of blobs are ineffective inducers of illusory contours. We also present a number of novel effects and report an experiment suggesting that the generic-viewpoint assumption strongly influences illusory-contour perception.
authors.affiliation: Vision Sciences Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02114, USA. mka@soton.ac.uk
authors.forename: M K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Albert
authors.forename: D D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Hoffman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003867:Depth Perception; D006801:Humans; D009903:Optical Illusions; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods