What makes viewpoint-invariant properties perceptually salient?

TitleWhat makes viewpoint-invariant properties perceptually salient?
Publication TypeJournal Articles
Year of Publication2003
AuthorsJacobs DW
JournalJournal of the Optical Society of America A
Volume20
Issue7
Pagination1304 - 1320
Date Published2003///
Abstract

It has been noted that many of the perceptually salient image properties identified by the Gestalt psychologists, such as collinearity, parallelism, and good continuation, are invariant to changes in viewpoint. However, I show that viewpoint invariance is not sufficient to distinguish these Gestalt properties; one can define an infinite number of viewpoint-invariant properties that are not perceptually salient. I then show that generally, the perceptually salient viewpoint-invariant properties are minimal, in the sense that they can be derived by using less image information than for nonsalient properties. This finding provides support for the hypothesis that the biological relevance of an image property is determined both by the extent to which it provides information about the world and by the ease with which this property can be computed. [An abbreviated version of this work, including technical details that are avoided in this paper, is contained in K. Boyer and S. Sarker, eds., Perceptual Organization for Artificial Vision Systems (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2000), pp. 121–138.]