Visual Perception and Cognition of Smoothly Curved Surfaces

光滑曲面的视觉感知和认知

• 批准号: 8908426
• 负责人: James Todd
• 金额: $ 20.59万
• 依托单位: Brandeis University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1989
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1989-09-01 至 1994-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8908426&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Visual; Perception; Cognition; Smoothly; Curved

This research will investigate the fundamental mechanisms by which human observers perceive and remember the 3D structures of smoothly curved surfaces. The project will address two basic questions: First, how are objects in 3-space represented mentally; and second, what are the properties of optical structure which determine this knowledge perceptually. It is clear from our perceptual experience that visual images on the retina provide sufficient information for us to perceive adequately the 3D structure of the environment; yet it is equally clear upon closer reflection that the properties of visual images seem to have little in common with the properties of real objects. Real objects exist in 3D space and are composed of tangible substances such as earth, metal, or flesh, while an image of an object is confined to a 2D projection surface and consists of nothing more than flickering patterns of light. Although the problem of how human observers are able to deal with this seemingly incommensurate mapping between objects and images is an ancient one, research in this area has been given a new impetus in recent years by attempts to develop artificial visual systems for robots and prosthetic devices for the blind. This project will attempt to facilitate these efforts by providing a more detailed understanding of how similar problems are solved by the human visual system. In order to model rigorously the processes of 3D form perception, it is first necessary to define precisely what those processes accomplish for us. Most previous investigations in this area have assumed that each visible surface point is encoded perceptually in terms of its metric depth relative to the point of observation. This research, in contrast, is designed to explore a much wider variety of potential representations. It builds on earlier findings that perceptual judgments of metric depth are surprisingly inaccurate and stems from the hypothesis, supported by the earlier results, that visual knowledge of 3D structure may often involve a more abstract form of representation in which an observed surface is perceptually encoded in terms of its nonmetric properties (e.g., those involving ordinal or nominal relations). A variety of experiments, using both natural and computer generated images, will test this hypothesis. They will require people to make various types of judgments requiring different levels of knowledge about 3D structure. Other experiments will identify some of the specific computational mechanisms through which perceptual representations of 3D form are generated from optical information, and measure the stability of these mechanisms over a wide range of viewing conditions.

这项研究将研究人类观察者感知并记住平滑弯曲表面的3D结构的基本机制。 该项目将解决两个基本问题：首先，三个空间中的对象在精神上如何表示；其次，光学结构的属性是什么，这些属性在感知上决定了这一知识。 从我们的感知经验可以明显看出，视网膜上的视觉图像为我们提供了足够的信息，可以充分感知环境的3D结构。然而，在更紧密的反射时，同样清楚的是，视觉图像的属性似乎与真实对象的属性几乎没有共同点。 真实物体存在于3D空间中，并由有形物质（例如地球，金属或肉体）组成，而物体的图像仅限于2D投影表面，仅包含闪烁的光模式。 尽管人类观察者如何能够处理对象和图像之间的看似不相称的映射的问题是一个古老的映射，但近年来，通过为盲人开发人工视觉系统的尝试，在这一领域的研究已获得了新的动力。 该项目将尝试通过对人类视觉系统如何解决类似问题的方式提供更详细的了解来促进这些努力。 为了严格对3D形式感知的过程进行建模，首先有必要确切地定义这些过程为我们完成的工作。 以前的大多数研究中的大多数研究都认为，每个可见的表面点相对于观察点而言，都根据其度量深度进行了感知的编码。 相比之下，这项研究旨在探索各种各样的潜在表示。 它基于较早的发现，即对度量深度的感知判断令人惊讶地不准确，并且源于早期结果的支持，即3D结构的视觉知识通常涉及一种更抽象的表示表面形式，在这种表述中，观察到的表面是根据其非衡量属性（例如那些涉及典型的关系）的表面进行编码的。 使用天然和计算机生成的图像的各种实验将检验该假设。 他们将要求人们做出各种类型的判断，需要有关3D结构的不同知识。 其他实验将确定一些特定的计算机制，通过这些计算机制，通过光学信息产生3D形式的感知表示，并在广泛的观察条件下测量这些机制的稳定性。