In this study the sensitivity of human vision to the smoothness of stereoscopic surface structure was investigated. In experiments 1 and 2 random-dot stereograms were used to evaluate the discrimination of smooth versus ‘noisy’ sinusoidal surfaces differing in the percentages of points on a single smooth surface. Fully coherent smooth surfaces were found to be much more discriminable than other less smooth randomly perturbed surfaces. In experiment 3 the discrimination between discontinuous triangle-wave surfaces and similarly shaped smoothly curved surfaces obtained from the addition of the fundamental and the third harmonic of the corresponding triangle-wave surface was evaluated. The triangle-wave surfaces were found to be more accurately discriminated from the smoothly curved surfaces than would be predicted from the detectability of the difference in their Fourier power spectra. This superior discriminability was attributed to differences between the curvature and/or discontinuity of the two surfaces. In experiment 3 the effects of incoherent ‘noise’ points on the discrimination between the two surface types were also evaluated. These randomly positioned noise points had a relatively small effect on the discrimination between the two surfaces. In general, the results of these experiments indicate that smooth surfaces are salient for stereopsis and that isolated local violations of smoothness are highly discriminable.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
DonerJLappinJPerfettoG, 1984“Detection of three-dimensional structure in moving optical patterns”Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance101–11
2.
GillamBChambersDRussoT, 1988“Postfusional latency in stereoscopic slant perception and the primitives of stereopsis”Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance14163–175
3.
GillamBFlaggTFinlayD, 1984“Evidence for disparity change as the primary stimulus for stereoscopic processing”Perception & Psychophysics36559–564
4.
GrimsonW E L, 1981From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
5.
JuleszB, 1971Foundations of Cyclopean Perception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press)
6.
JuleszBChangJ J, 1976“Interaction between pools of binocular disparity detectors tuned to different disparities”Biological Cybernetics22107–119
7.
JuleszBTylerC W, 1976“Neurontropy, an entropy-like measure of neural correlation, in binocular fusion and rivalry”Biological Cybernetics2325–32
KoenderinkJ JVan DoornA J, 1975“Invariant properties of the motion parallax field due to the movement of rigid bodies relative to an observer”Optica Acta22773–791
10.
KoenderinkJ JVan DoornA J, 1976a“Geometry of binocular vision and a model for stereopsis”Biological Cybernetics2129–35
11.
KoenderinkJ JVan DoornA J, 1976b“Local structure of movement parallax of the plane”Journal of the Optical Society of America66717–723
12.
KoenderinkJ JVan DoornA J, 1976c“Singularities of the visual mapping”Biological Cybernetics2451–59
13.
KoenderinkJ JVan DoornA J, 1977“How an ambulant observer can construct a model of the environment from the geometrical structure of the visual inflow” in Kybernetik Eds HauskeGButenandtE (Munich: Oldenberg)
14.
LappinJ S, 1990“Perceiving the metric structure of environmental objects from motion and stereopsis” in The Perception and Control of Self-motion Eds WarrenRWertheimA H (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum)
15.
LappinJ SDonerJ FKottasB L, 1980“Minimal conditions for the visual detection of structure and motion in three-dimensions”Science209717–719
16.
LappinJ SFuquaM S, 1982“Nonlinear recruitment in the visual detection of moving patterns”Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual ScienceSupplement 22123 (ARVO Abstracts)
17.
LinkNZuckerS W, 1987“Sensitivity to corners in flow patterns”Spatial Vision2233–244
18.
LinkNZuckerS W, 1988“Corner detection in curvilinear dot grouping”Biological Cybernetics59247–256
19.
LuceR D, 1963“Detection and recognition” in Handbook of Mathematical Psychologyvolume 1 Eds LuceR DBushR RGalanterE (New York: John Wiley)
20.
MarrD, 1982Vision (San Francisco, CA: W H Freeman)
21.
MarrDPoggioT, 1979“A computational theory of human stereo vision”Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B204301–328
22.
MayhewJ E WFrisbyJ P, 1981“Psychophysical and computational studies towards a theory of human stereopsis”Artificial Intelligence16349–385
23.
MayhewJ E WLonguet-HigginsH C, 1982“A computational model of binocular depth perception”Nature (London)297376–378
24.
MitchisonG JMcKeeS P, 1987a“The resolution of ambiguous stereoscopic matches by interpolation”Vision Research27285–294
25.
MitchisonG JMcKeeS P, 1987b“Interpolation and the detection of fine structure in stereoscopic matching”Vision Research27295–302
26.
NelsonJ I, 1975“Globality and stereoscopic fusion in binocular vision”Journal of Theoretical Biology491–88
27.
PoggioG FPoggioT, 1984“The analysis of stereopsis”Annual Review of Neuroscience7379–412
28.
RogersB JCagenelloR B, 1989“Disparity curvature and the perception of three-dimensional surfaces”Nature (London)339135–137
29.
RogersBGrahamM, 1982“Similarities between motion parallax and stereopsis in human depth perception”Vision Research22261–270
30.
SchumerR, 1979Mechanisms in Human Stereopsisunpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
31.
SchumerRGanzL, 1979“Independent stereoscopic channels for different extents of spatial pooling”Vision Research191303–1314
32.
SperlingG, 1970“Binocular vision: A physical and a neural theory”American Journal of Psychology83461–534
33.
StevensK ABrookesA, 1988“Integrating stereopsis with monocular interpretations of planar surfaces”Vision Research28371–386
34.
TerzopoulosD, 1988“The computation of visible-surface representations”IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence10417–438
35.
TylerC W, 1974“Depth perception in disparity gratings”Nature (London)251140–142
36.
TylerC W, 1975“Spatial organization of binocular disparity sensitivity”Vision Research15583–590
37.
TylerC WJuleszB, 1976“The neural transfer characteristic (Neurontropy) for binocular stochastic stimulation”Biological Cybernetics2333–37
38.
UttalW R, 1987The Perception of Dotted Forms (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates)
39.
UttalW RDavisN SWelkeCKakaralaR, 1988“The reconstruction of static visual forms from sparse dotted samples”Perception & Psychophysics43223–240
40.
WestheimerG, 1986a“Spatial interaction in the domain of disparity signals in human stereoscopic vision”Journal of Physiology370619–629
41.
WestheimerG, 1986b“Panum's phenomenon and the confluence of signals from the two eyes in stereoscopy”Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B228289–305
42.
ZuckerS W, 1986“The computational connection in vision: Early orientation selection”Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers18608–617
43.
ZuckerS WDobbinsAIversonL, 1989“Two stages of curve detection suggest two styles of visual computation”Neural Computation168–81
44.
ZuckerS WIversonL, 1987“From orientation selection to optic flow”Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing37196–220
