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Lecture 2: 3D vision
Andrew Glennerster

Pictorial cues. These are all the cues to depth that you get from viewing a
scene from a single vantage point (i.e. looking with only one eye and keeping
your head still). Pictorial cues can give a powerful impression of depth. The light
rays arriving at your eye cannot tell you unambiguously about the distance to an
object, so it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether you are looking at a flat
picture or a real scene.
To choose one interpretation out of all the possible 3D scenes that could give rise to an image, you need to
make assumptions. Pick out pairs of lines in each of these 3 examples (the two street paintings and the Ames
room) that you assume to be parallel (or perpendicular) to each other but which in fact are not. It is only our
assumptions about the 3D layout of surfaces that encourage us to believe that the edges in the scene are
parallel (or perpendicular). Assumptions about the world strongly influence our perceptions. This is a recurring
theme in these lectures, with several examples and a brief discussion of the theory in the section on Bayes in
lecture 4.

A different viewpoint. Seeing the street painting from a different viewpoint

shows you that it is flat, and seeing the Ames room from the side shows you it is
an odd shape. In general, two or more views of a scene should allow you (or a
computer program) to calculate its 3D structure. Think of an architect's plan,
side view and elevation, which together specify the 3D location of all the points.

Shadows. One pictorial cue is the arrangement of shadows. When a shadow is

separated from the object, it gives information about the height of the object
above the ground.

These examples are discussed by Mammassian et al. (1998, full text @ free.fr) and Casati (2004, full text @
rdg).

Two or more views. Unlike pictorial cues, multiple views of a scene can tell you
unambiguously about the 3D structure of a scene. The first thing the brain needs
to do is match up features in the different views. Then it needs to work out what
3D scene could explain all the views.

For a slightly more detailed discussion see Glennerster (2011). Binocular vision is a special case of the problem
faced by a moving observer. A static binocular observer has only two views but most of the time the brain has to
deal with many more.
Binocular and pictorial cues. When the pictorial cues are sufficiently strong, it
is difficult for the binocular stereo cues to win out. (If they did win out, they would
show the nests recede, going into the screen). This is similar to the hollow face
illusion in the last lecture in that it shows the power of our assumptions about
object shape.

Assumptions about stability. If we just reconstructed a little model of the

scene in our heads, like the computer vision program I showed or like the
binocular case I went through (finding where the red and green rays crossed),
then subjects in this experiment should be able to work out that the room
changes size. The fact that subjects do not notice the size change shows that
their assumptions about the room are crucial (assumptions that bricks, tiles and
room stay the same size and that the floor stays the same height beneath
them).

Glennerster et al (2006, full text @ rdg) discuss this experiment.

References

Beever, J http://www.grand-illusions.com/opticalillusions/beever_1/ [Street painting and other

illusions]

Casati, R. (2004) The shadow knows: a primer on the informational structure of cast shadows.
Perception, 33, 1385-1396.

Glennerster, A. (2011) Depth Perception, pp232 - 235, In Pashler, H. (Ed) The Encyclopedia
of the Mind, SAGE Reference, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA
(http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~sxs05ag/pub/g2013/g2013.html)

Glennerster, A., Tcheang, L, Gilson, S. J., Fitzgibbon, A. W. and Parker, A. J. (2006) Humans
ignore motion and stereo cues in favour of a fictional stable world. Current Biology, 16,
428-432 [A description of the expanding room experiment.
http://www.reading.ac.uk/3Dvision/3d-res-visualspace.aspx]

Mamassian, P, Knill, D.C. And Kersten, D. (1998) The perception of cast shadows. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 2, 288-295