Past Event

Dr. Ingo Fründ of York University will be giving a colloquium talk on Thursday, March 20th, at noon, in room 2203 of Dunton Tower. Refreshments will be available before the talk. All are welcome.

Plausibility in human shape perception

Shape is a central aspect of our visual experience, yet shape is not directly present in naturalistic images. Our visual system seems to construct shape from the spatial luminance profile in natural images by a combination of bottom-up feature extraction and top-down expectations about plausible shapes. Although the first stages of feature extraction are fairly well understood in humans, little is known about expectations about plausible shapes.

We hypothesized that expectations about plausible shapes can be described by a probabilistic generative model for planar shapes. We constructed a class of maximum entropy models that captured successively more local features of natural shapes. I will report results from two experiments that attempt to test the ability of these models to describe human expectations about plausible shapes.