Object Perception Mechanisms for Resolving Ambiguity

描述（由申请人提供）：尽管自然图像的复杂性和客观模糊性，但人类能够快速可靠地感知物体的形状。由于投影的影响以及遮挡、背景杂波、照明和视点的巨大变化，物体的图像特征是模糊的。日常视觉的成功意味着神经机制将模糊或“嘈杂”的局部特征组织成物体和表面，这一机制尚待理解。我们过去在视觉感知贝叶斯理论方面的工作表明，如何通过先验对象知识与图像特征的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对象感知中模糊解决的功能和机制的模型。

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.