Back to the Gestalt Programme

Chapter 2 proposed a classification of gestalt grouping processes. The basic grouping laws that group points if they share some geometric quality were called partial gestalts. A synopsis of all partial gestalts computed in this book is presented in Section 14.1. At the end of the chapter, a review of other gestalts computed in recent works confirms that all partial gestalts can be computed by similar methods. Thus, the focus in the computational gestalt programme should now be to formalize the more general gestalt principles, starting with gestalt collaboration and competition. How far do we stand in that direction? One of the grouping laws, the vanishing point detector, uses previously calculated gestalts, namely alignments. Thus, at least in this case, the recursive gestalt building up has been addressed. In Section 14.2 a successful complete gestalt analysis will be performed on a digital image by combining most partial gestalts computed so far. On the dark side, Section 14.3 presents a series of striking experimental examples showing perceptually wrong detections in the absence of collateral inhibition between conflicting partial gestalts. These experiments show that the gestalt programme still lacks some fundamental principle on gestalt interaction. A good candidate would be an extension of the exclusion principle introduced in Chapter 6. Another possibility would be to go back to variational principles like the Minimum Description Length principle. We address this possibility in the next and last chapter.