Study Guide #4 Fall 2012 What is projective geometry?

Explain how foreshortening and size scaling help us interpret scenes in 3 dimensions. o o Projective geometry investigates the mathematical relationships between objects in the environment and their optical projections on the retina or on a picture. Foreshortening- The use of perspective to represent in art the apparent visual contraction of an object that extends back in space at an angle to the perpendicular plane of sight. Changes in surface orientation causes projected shape to change o Size scaling- changes in surface depth causes projected size to change

1.

2.

What are the

4 perceptual biases the visual system relies on to resolve ambiguities in mapping

2-D visual information into 3-D perception. Give an explicit example of each.

i. perceived as resting on the ground (shadows/illuminations can override) ii. depth increases with height in the viewing plane iii. Convex interpretations are preferred over concave ones. iv. generic views are preferred over those that require a specific vantage point

3.

What is an Ames Room and what is the underlying principle that causes the objects within it to have illusory sizes?

Trapezoidal room; creates an optical illusion with one large and one small person, a specially designed room that is trapezoidal in shape but appears to be rectangular. This room gives misleading visual cues that lead people to believe that

two similar-sized objects are of different sizes, depending on

where their locations in the room are.

4.

What are generic views? Accidental views? Non-accidental properties? What relevance do they have in the study of 3D structure? Give a specific example.

Generic viewsAccidental views -if you look straight on at a box, you see a square, if you look at a bottle, you see a circle;

there are 26 combinations of ways you can define objects; require

a specific vantage point

-An accidental view of curved edges can produce the perception of an Impossible Cube or Triangle.

Non-accidental properties- parallel lines and vertices, implicit knowledge of environment regularities facilitates viewpoint-invariant recognition; are properties of an image such as co-linearity co-termination parallelism

that seldom occur by accident within optical projections. Thus, if lines in an image are parallel (or coterminate), they will be interpreted perceptually as if they are parallel (or co-terminating) in the 3D environment.

5.

What was Brunelleschis Panel? What is the depth cue on which it was based?
(Linear Perspective) -convergence on a vanishing point -In 1413, Brunelleschi painted a picture of a baptistery on some silver. He drilled a hole into the painting and held up a mirror, and the Italians he did this to couldnt tell the difference between the real building and the painted building through the pinhole. -In 1417, he drew a church exactly before it was made that way. -Depth cue he exploited was linear perspective- idea being: there is a vanishing point where all the parallel lines meet up and in infinity they go to zero.

6.

What is anamorphic art? Give three examples Anamorphic Art: a distorted projection or perspective; especially an image distorted in

such a way that it becomes visible only when viewed in a special manner. "Ana - morphosis" are Greek words meaning "formed again." o o o Examples: Orosz- mirror cylinder on top of finger painting. Julian Beever- chalk art (nonaccidental alignments). Varlini- yellow square on picture (continuous contours).

7.

How, in principle, could the visual system use ocular-motor cues to deduce the relative distances of objects from the viewer?

Convergence and accommodation

(These are cues based on the ability to sense the position of our eyes and the tension in the eye muscles.)

8.

What is linear perspective and how can the visual system use this cue to deduce relative depth from the observer. What is the horizon ratio? Convergence on a vanishing point Horizon ratio- The horizon ratio principle states that, if a person is standing on flat

terrain, the place where the horizon intersects the object will be one eye-height above the ground.

9.

How do special effects editors create the perception of giant or diminutive people in movies

Special effects use: forced perspective- employs the optical illusion to make an object appear on a different scale -manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation

between them and the vantage point of the camera

-displacement of objects for one to be closer to the camera and therefore look bigger

10. What is meant by surface texture and how can it be used to define 3-D structure?

11. What is chiaroscuro? What is bas-relief Chiaroscuro- shading varies with orientation of surface to light

source, not viewer. Use of

light to unify the scene; give 3D appearance to objects, and to create emotional effects. Bas-relief-type of sculpture in which the relief of the depicted objects is much flatter than would ordinarily be the case. However, this has little effect on perceived 3D structure.

12. What is retinal disparity? Crossed and uncrossed disparity? What is the horopter? Retinal Disparity- The difference between two images on the retina when looking at a visual stimulus. This occurs since the two retinas do not have the same view of the stimulus because of the location of our eyes. Thus the left eye does not get exactly the same view as the right eye. Crossed Disparity-right eyes image is to the left of the left eyes image. Point is in front of

the image plane.

Uncrossed Disparity- right eyes image is to the right of the left eyes image. Point is behind

the image plane.

Horopter-the locus of distal points that produce corresponding points on the retinas of the two eyes

13. Consider an anaglyph that will be viewed with stereo glasses (red lens over the left eye; blue over
right). How do they work? How

do they differ from the 3-D glasses that are used in

movie theaters?
Anaglyph 3D images contain two differently filtered colored images, one for each eye. When

viewed through the "color coded" "anaglyph glasses", each of the two images reaches one eye, revealing an integrated stereoscopic image. The visual cortex of the brain fuses this into perception of a three dimensional scene or composition.

14. What is the kinetic depth effect? What is the ball in the box phenomenon? What does it tell us about motion perception

Kinetic depth effect-when the same picture is drawn twice, at slightly different angles, and alternately flashed before a viewer they appear 3D

Ball in box- when shadow moves with same trajectory as ball the ball appears

to roll on the

ground. When the shadow moves with a different trajectory the ball appears to rise above the
ground.

15. How do vertices constrain the interpretation of 3D shapes from line drawings? What is an impossible figure?

16. What are occlusion edges, orientation edges, smooth occlusion contours, edge occlusion contours, shadow contours, and specular highlights? Give an example of each. Generally speaking, how

does edge labeling by analysis of contours and vertices help the visual system see objects against a background or in relation to other objects in a visual scene?

Occlusion edgesOrientation edgesSmooth occlusion contoursEdge occlusion contoursShadow contoursSpecular highlights-

17. How can edge labeling be used to determine if a figure is possible or impossible?

18. Explain the theory of Recognition by Components, which has been popularized by Irv Biederman. Be sure to discuss non-accidental properties in your answer. What is the evidence to support this theory?

Recognition by components= viewpoint invariance, objects do not change when viewpoint changes The basic assumption of this theory is that any given view of an object can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3-D shapes called geons. There are many different geons, including such shapes as cylinders and cones, among others. These geons can be combined in many different ways to form countless 3-dimensional objects. According to Irving Biederman, any given person is familiar with about 30,000 objects, and recognizing them requires no more than 36 different geons.

19. What are template (or view based) models of recognition? What evidence has been presented to support this approach? View-bases, template-like = novel objects (new) greebles- viewpoint dependent component

20. What are the characteristics of object agnosia. What is prosopagnosia?

Agnosia is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Agnosia only affects a single modality for example vision or hearing may be affected.

Prosopagnosia- also called face blindness, is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage, but a congenital form of the disorder has been proposed, which may be inherited by about 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus, which activates specifically in response to faces. Thanks to this specialization, most people recognize faces much more effectively than they do similarly complex inanimate objects. For those with prosopagnosia, the ability to recognize faces depends on the less-sensitive object recognition system.

21. What is the evidence that face recognition involves a specialized mechanism? Brain damage to a specific area

22. What is the Margret Thatcher illusion? What is the American Gothic illusion. What do they tell us about face recognition.

The Thatcher effect or Thatcher illusion -is a phenomenon where it becomes difficult to detect local feature changes in an upside down face, despite identical changes being obvious in an upright face. It is named after British former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on whose photograph the effect has been most famously demonstrated. This was originally created by Peter Thompson, in 1980. American Gothic illusion-

This is thought to be due to specific psychological processes involved in face perception which are tuned especially to upright faces. Faces

seem unique despite the fact that they are very similar. It

has been hypothesised that we develop specific processes to differentiate between faces that rely as much on the configuration (the structural relationship between individual features on the face) as the details of individual face features, such as the eyes, nose and mouth. When a face is upside down, the configural processing cannot take place, and so minor differences are more difficult to detect. The local inversion of individual dots is hard, and in some cases, nearly impossible to recognize when the entire figure is inverted.

23. What evidence has been presented to suggest that faces are represented by their differences from the average face?

24. What is optic flow, and how is it used to determine the relative motion between the observer and the surrounding environment.

Optic flow- the changing angular positions of points in a perspective image that we experience as we move throughout the world

25. What is the perception-action cycle? What were the examples discussed in class to demonstrate this concept?

26. What is the focus of expansion, and what does it tell us about the direction of locomotion? Focus of expansion- (the pilots heading)- the point in the center of the horizon

27. What are the sources of information for determining time to contact and for catching a fly ball?

Time to collision (TTC) = distance/rate and tau Depth perception arises from a variety of depth cues. These are typically classified into binocular cues that are based on the receipt of sensory information in three dimensions from both eyes and monocular cues that can be represented in just two dimensions and observed with just one eye.

Binocular cues include stereopsis, eye convergence, disparity, and yielding depth from binocular vision through exploitation of parallax.

Monocular cues include size: distant objects subtend smaller visual angles than near objects, grain, size, and Parallax