Minimum length in the tangent bundle as a model for curve completion

Guy Ben-Yosef, Ohad Ben-Shahar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

The phenomenon of visual curve completion, where the visual system completes the missing part (e.g., due to occlusion) between two contour fragments, is a major problem in perceptual organization research. Previous computational approaches for the shape of the completed curve typically follow formal descriptions of desired, image-based perceptual properties (e.g, minimum total curvature, roundedness, etc...). Unfortunately, however, it is difficult to determine such desired properties psychophysically and indeed there is no consensus in the literature for what they should be. Instead, in this paper we suggest to exploit the fact that curve completion occurs in early vision in order to formalize the problem in a space that explicitly abstracts the primary visual cortex. We first argue that a suitable abstraction is the unit tangent bundle R2 x S1 and then we show that a basic principle of "minimum energy consumption" in this space, namely a minimum length completion, entails desired perceptual properties for the completion in the image plane. We present formal theoretical analysis and numerical solution methods, we show results on natural images and their advantage over existing popular approaches, and we discuss how our theory explains recent findings from the perceptual literature using basic principles only.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2010
Pages2384-2391
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 31 Aug 2010
Event2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2010 - San Francisco, CA, United States
Duration: 13 Jun 201018 Jun 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco, CA
Period13/06/1018/06/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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