Psychophysics with Junctions in Real Images

Junctions, formed at the intersection of image contours, are thought to play an important and early role in vision. The interest in junctions can be attributed in part to the notion that they are local image features that are easy to detect but that nonetheless provide valuable information about important events in the world, such as occlusion and transparency. Here I test the notion that there are locally defined junctions in real images that might be detected with simple, early visual mechanisms. Human observers were used as a tool to measure the visual information available in local regions of real images. One set of observers was made to label all the points in a set of real images where one edge occluded another. A second set of observers was presented with variable-size circular subregions of these images, and was asked to judge whether the regions were centered on an occlusion point. This task is easy if junctions are visible, but I found performance to be poor for small regions, not approaching ceiling levels until observers were given fairly large (∼ 50 pixels in diameter) regions over which to make the judgment. Control experiments ruled out the possibility that the effects are just due to junctions at multiple scales. Experiments reported here suggest that, although some junctions in real images are locally defined and can be detected with simple mechanisms, a substantial fraction necessitate the use of more complex and global processes. This raises the possibility that junctions in such cases may not be detected prior to scene interpretation.