Perception Of Local Shape Research Articles

Links between global and local shape perception, coloured backgrounds, colour discrimination, and non-verbal IQ

This study explored associations between local and global shape perception on coloured backgrounds, colour discrimination, and non-verbal IQ (NVIQ). Five background colours were chosen for the local and global shape tasks that were tailored for the cone-opponent pathways early in the visual system (cardinal colour directions: L-M, loosely, reddish-greenish; and S-(L + M), or tritan colours, loosely, blueish-yellowish; where L, M and S refer to the long, middle and short wavelength sensitive cones). Participants also completed the Farnsworth-Munsell 100-hue test (FM100) to determine whether performance on the local and global shape tasks correlated with colour discrimination overall, or with performance on the L-M and tritan subsets of the FM100 test. Overall performance on the local and global shape tasks did correlate with scores on the FM100 tests, despite the colour of the background being irrelevant to the shape tasks. There were also significantly larger associations between scores for the L-M subset of the FM100 test, compared to the tritan subset, and accuracy on some of the shape tasks on the reddish, greenish and neutral backgrounds. Participants also completed the non-verbal components of the WAIS and the SPM+ version of Raven’s progressive matrices, to determine whether performance on the FM100 test, and on the local and global shape tasks, correlated with NVIQ. FM100 scores correlated significantly with both WAIS and SPM+ scores. These results extend previous work that has indicated FM100 performance is not purely a measure of colour discrimination, but also involves aspects of each participant’s NVIQ, such as the ability to attend to local and global aspects of the test, part-whole relationships, perceptual organisation and good visuomotor skills. Overall performance on the local and global shape tasks correlated only with the WAIS scores, not the SPM+. These results indicate that those aspects of NVIQ that engage spatial comprehension of local-global relationships and manual manipulation (WAIS), rather than more abstract reasoning (SPM+), are related to performance on the local and global shape tasks. Links are presented between various measures of NVIQ and performance on visual tasks, but they are currently seldom addressed in studies of either shape or colour perception. Further studies to explore these issues are recommended.

Effects of surface reflectance on local second order shape estimation in dynamic scenes

In dynamic scenes, relative motion between the object, the observer, and/or the environment projects as dynamic visual information onto the retina (optic flow) that facilitates 3D shape perception. When the object is diffusely reflective, e.g. a matte painted surface, this optic flow is directly linked to object shape, a property found at the foundations of most traditional shape-from-motion (SfM) schemes. When the object is specular, the corresponding specular flow is related to shape curvature, a regime change that challenges the visual system to determine concurrently both the shape and the distortions of the (sometimes unknown) environment reflected from its surface. While human observers are able to judge the global 3D shape of most specular objects, shape-from-specular-flow (SFSF) is not veridical. In fact, recent studies have also shown systematic biases in the perceived motion of such objects. Here we focus on the perception of local shape from specular flow and compare it to that of matte-textured rotating objects. Observers judged local surface shape by adjusting a rotation and scale invariant shape index probe. Compared to shape judgments of static objects we find that object motion decreases intra-observer variability in local shape estimation. Moreover, object motion introduces systematic changes in perceived shape between matte-textured and specular conditions. Taken together, this study provides a new insight toward the contribution of motion and surface material to local shape perception.

Importance-Driven Accessory Lights Designfor Enhancing Local Shapes

We introduce a semi-automatic lighting design method that deploys per-voxel accessory lights (fill and detail lights) to enhance local shapes, as well as to increase the perceptibility and visual saliency of an object. Our approach allows the user to manually design arbitrary lights in a scene for creating the desired feeling of emotion. The user designed lights are used as key lights and our approach automatically configures per-voxel accessory lights that preserve the user designed feeling of emotion. Per-voxel fill lights brighten the shadows and thus increase the perceptibility and visual saliency. Per-voxel detail lights enhance the visual cues for the local shape perception. Moreover, the revealed local shapes are controlled by the user employing an importance distribution. Similarly, the perceptibility and visual saliency are also controlled based on an importance distribution. Our perceptual measurement guarantees that the revealed local shapes are independent of the key lights. In addition, our method provides two control parameters, which adjust the fill and detail lights, to provide the user with additional flexibility in designing the expected lighting effect. The major contributions of this paper are the idea of using the importance distribution to control local shapes, the per-voxel accessory lights and the perceptual measurement.

Perception of local shape from shading.

Theoretically, metric solid shape is not determined uniquely by shading. Consequently, human vision has difficulty in categorizing shape when shading is the only cue. In the present research, subjects were required to categorize shaded quadric surfaces. We found that they were rather poor at this task; they confused hyperbolic and elliptic (both convex and concave) shapes easily. When a cast shadow visually indicated the direction of the illuminant, they were able to notice the concavity or convexity of elliptic shapes. However, they still confused elliptic and hyperbolic ones. Finally, when an animated sequence of eight intensity patterns belonging to one quadric shape had been displayed, the subjects were able to categorize the quadrics. However, the results are still quite moderate. Our experiments indicate that local shading structure is only a weak shape cue when presented in the absence of other visual cues.

Spatial and chromatic interactions in the lateral geniculate body of the rhesus monkey.

Spatial and chromatic interactions in the lateral geniculate body of the rhesus monkey.