Abstract
Estimating local surface orientation (slant and tilt) is fundamental to recovering the three-dimensional structure of the environment. It is unknown how well humans perform this task in natural scenes. Here, with a database of natural stereo-images having groundtruth surface orientation at each pixel, we find dramatic differences in human tilt estimation with natural and artificial stimuli. Estimates are precise and unbiased with artificial stimuli and imprecise and strongly biased with natural stimuli. An image-computable Bayes optimal model grounded in natural scene statistics predicts human bias, precision, and trial-by-trial errors without fitting parameters to the human data. The similarities between human and model performance suggest that the complex human performance patterns with natural stimuli are lawful, and that human visual systems have internalized local image and scene statistics to optimally infer the three-dimensional structure of the environment. These results generalize our understanding of vision from the lab to the real world.
Highlights
Understanding how vision works in natural conditions is a primary goal of vision research
Relatively little is known about how the human visual system estimates 3D surface orientation from images of natural scenes
The same observers estimated surface tilt with an extensive set of artificial planar stimuli that were matched to the tilts, slants, distances, and luminance contrasts of the natural stimuli presented in the experiment. (Each planar artificial stimulus had one of three texture types: 1/f noise, 3.5 cpd plaid, and 5.25 cpd plaid; Figure 2—figure supplement 3.) any observed performance differences between natural and artificial stimuli cannot be attributed to these dimensions
Summary
Understanding how vision works in natural conditions is a primary goal of vision research. One measure of success is the degree to which performance in a fundamental visual task can be predicted directly from image data. Estimating the 3D structure of the environment from 2D retinal images is just such a task. Relatively little is known about how the human visual system estimates 3D surface orientation from images of natural scenes.
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