Abstract
In images of textured 3-D surfaces, orientation flows created by the texture components parallel to the surface slant play a critical role in conveying the surface slant and shape. This study examines the visibility of these orientation flows in complex patterns. Specifically, we examine the effect of orientation of neighboring texture components on orientation flow visibility. Complex plaids consisting of gratings equally spaced in orientation were mapped onto planar and curved surfaces. The visibility of the component that creates the orientation flows was quantified by measuring its contrast threshold (CT) while varying the combination of neighboring components present in the pattern. CTs were consistently lowest only when components closest in orientation to that of the orientation flows were subtracted from the pattern. This finding suggests that a previously reported frequency-selective cross-orientation suppression mechanism involved with the perception of 3-D shape from texture is affected by proximity in orientation of concurrent texture components.
Highlights
Texture markings on a 3-D surface provide potentially useful cues to the 3-D shape of the surface when the surface is viewed in a 2-D image [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
Using the Bonferroni procedure for all pairwise comparisons, we found that contrast threshold (CT) were significantly reduced when the components closest in orientation to that of the flows were subtracted out of the overall pattern (Pattern 4) reflecting the fact that the orientation flows were unmasked and most visible
The goal of the current study was to examine the effects of orientation of non-critical texture components on the visibility of critical orientation flows for 3-D shape
Summary
Texture markings on a 3-D surface provide potentially useful cues to the 3-D shape of the surface when the surface is viewed in a 2-D image [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. In the perspective image of the surface, oriented components of the texture that are parallel to the surface slant (in this example the horizontal grating component) converge and diverge forming patterns that we refer to as orientation flows (shown in isolation in Figure 1b), which exhibit minimal spatial frequency modulation. Other oriented components exhibit local changes in orientation, it is the pattern of flows formed by the component running parallel to the surface slant that contains sufficient information to distinguish 3-D curvatures and that consistently conveys 3-D shape in isolation [12,13]. Given that most surface texture patterns contain multiple oriented components, the goal of the current study is to examine how the visibility of orientation flows for 3-D shape is affected by the presence of other oriented components in the surface texture
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