Object Perception Mechanisms for Resolving Ambiguity

描述(申请人提供)：尽管自然图像的复杂性和客观模糊性，人类仍能快速、可靠地感知物体的形状。由于投影的影响以及遮挡、背景杂乱、照明和视点的巨大变化，对象的图像特征是模糊的。日常视觉的成功意味着尚未被理解的神经机制，它将含糊的或“嘈杂的”局部特征组织成物体和表面。我们过去在视觉感知的贝叶斯理论方面的工作表明，如何通过将先验对象知识与图像特征进行概率整合来解决歧义。我们建议将这项工作扩展到开发和测试物体知觉中歧义消解的功能和机制的模型。 我们提出了四个系列的实验，使用心理物理、计算和神经成像方法来研究人类视觉系统如何在给定遮挡的情况下确定对象形状、根据模糊线索构建表面表示、估计对象深度的变化以及从真实的背景杂波中分割形状。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Humans perceive the shapes of objects quickly and reliably despite the complexity and objective ambiguities of natural images. Image features for an object are ambiguous because of the effects of projection together with large variations in occlusion, background clutter, illumination, and viewpoint. The very success of everyday vision implies neural mechanisms, yet to be understood, that organize ambiguous or "noisy" local features into objects and surfaces. Our past work in Bayesian theories of visual perception has shown how ambiguity may be resolved through the probabilistic integration of prior object knowledge with image features. We propose to extend this work to develop and test models of the functions and mechanisms underlying the resolution of ambiguity in object perception. We propose four series of experiments that use psychophysical, computational, and neuroimaging methods to investigate how the human visual system determines object shape given occlusion, constructs surface representations from ambiguous cues, estimates changes in object depth and segments shape from realistic background clutter.