Surface Formation and Depth in Monocular Scene Perception

Abstract

The visual perception of monocular stimuli perceived as 3-D objects has received considerable attention from researchers in human and machine vision. However, most previous research has focused on how individual 3-D objects are perceived. Here this is extended to a study of how the structure of 3-D scenes containing multiple, possibly disconnected objects and features is perceived. Da Vinci stereopsis, stereo capture, and other surface formation and interpolation phenomena in stereopsis and structure-from-motion suggest that small features having ambiguous depth may be assigned depth by interpolation with features having unambiguous depth. I investigated whether vision may use similar mechanisms to assign relative depth to multiple objects and features in sparse monocular images, such as line drawings, especially when other depth cues are absent. I propose that vision tends to organize disconnected objects and features into common surfaces to construct 3-D-scene interpretations. Interpolations that are too weak to generate a visible surface percept may still be strong enough to assign relative depth to objects within a scene. When there exists more than one possible surface interpolation in a scene, the visual system's preference for one interpolation over another seems to be influenced by a number of factors, including: (i) proximity, (ii) smoothness, (iii) a preference for roughly frontoparallel surfaces and ‘ground’ surfaces, (iv) attention and fixation, and (v) higher-level factors. I present a variety of demonstrations and an experiment to support this surface-formation hypothesis.