A contour propagation approach to surface filling-in and volume formation.
A new approach to surface and volume formation is introduced in response to the question, "Why do some silhouettes look 3 dimensional (3D) and others look 2D?" The central idea is that form information can propagate away from a "propagable segment" (PS) of occluding contour that could have projected onto the image from the visible portion of a cross-section of a surface. A key property of a PS is that it exhibits abrupt curvature changes where it meets the rest of the occluding contour. An algorithm is described for filling in curved surfaces from a PS: When copies of a PS are propagated into the interior, they act as cross-sectional surface contours that also exhibit abrupt curvature changes with the rest of the occluding contour. The result is a nonmetric coding of 3D-shape in terms of local ordinal surface curvature and orientation relationships that is scale, translation, and rotation invariant.
Tse
Peter Ulric
PU
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany. peter.tse@dartmouth.edu
D000465:Algorithms; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012160:Retina / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*