Perception of three-dimensional form from patterns of optical texture.

Abstract

The research described in the present article was designed to mveslagate how patterns of opttcal texture provide mformatmn about the three-dlmensmnal structure of objects in space Four experiments were performed m which observers were asked to judge the percewed depth of simulated ellipsoid surfaces under a variety of experimental conchUons.The results revealed that (a) judged depth increases hnearly with simulated depth although the slope of this relataon varies slgmficantly among different types of texture patterns (b) Random vanataons m the sizes and shapes of individual surface elements have no detectable effect on observers' judgments (c) The perceptmn of threedlmensmnal form is qmte strong for surfaces displayed under parallel projection, but the amount of apparent depth is shghtly less than for identical surfaces displayed under polar projectmn (d) Finally, the percewed depth of a surface is ehmmated ffthe optacal elements m a display are not sufficiently elongated or ff they are not approximately aligned with one another A theoretical explanatmn of these findings is proposed based on the neural network analysis of Grossberg and Mmgolla Human observers have a remarkable ability to obtmn reformation from visual stimulation in order to perceive the layout of surfaces in the surrounding environment.In natural vision, a perceived surface can be redundantly specified by many different aspects of optical structure.The present experiments were designed, however, to examine one small component of this overall process--namely, the perception of three-dimensional form from patterns of optical texture.The concept of texture m the study of visual surface perception was introduced almost 40 years ago m a classic series of articles by James Gibson (1947Gibson ( , 1950aGibson ( , 1950b)).Gibson observed that most of the surfaces encountered m nature have