Visual routines

Abstract

This paper examines the processing of visual information beyond the creation of the early representations. A fundamental requirement at this level is the capacity to establish visually abstract shape properties and spatial relations. This capacity plays a major role in object recognition, visually guided manipulation, and more abstract visual thinking. For the human visual system, the perception of spatial properties and relations that are complex from a computational standpoint nevertheless often appears deceivingly immediate and effortless. The proficiency of the human system in analyzing spatial information far surpasses the capacities of current artificial systems. The study of the computations that underlie this competence may therefore lead to the development of new more efficient methods for the spatial analysis of visual information. The perception of abstract shape properties and spatial relations raises fundamental difficulties with major implications for the overall processing of visual information. It will be argued that the computation of spatial relations divides the analysis of visual information into two main stages. The first is the bottom-up creation of certain representations of the visible environment. The second stage involves the application of process called ‘visual routines’ to the representations constructed in the first stage. These routines can establish properties and relations that cannot be represented explicitly in the initial representations. Visual routines are composed of sequences of elemental operations. Routines for different properties and relations share elemental operations. Using a fixed set of basic operations, the visual system can assemble different routines to extract an unbounded variety of shape properties and spatial relations.