Abstract
We measured local surface attitude for monocular pictorial relief and performed pairwise depthcomparison judgments on the same picture. Both measurements were subject to internal consistency checks. We found that both measurements were consistent with a relief (continuous pictorial surface) interpretation within the session-to-session scatter. We reconstructed the pictorial relief from both measurements separately, and found results that differed in detail but were quite similar in their basic structures. Formally, one expects certain geometrical identities that relate range and attitude data. Because we have independent measurements of both, we can attempt an empirical verification of such geometrical identities. Moreover, we can check whether the statistical scatter in the data indicates that, for example, the surface attitudes are derivable from a depth map or vice versa. We estimate that pairwise depth comparisons are an order of magnitude less precise than might be expected from the attitude data. Thus, the surface attitudes cannot be derived from a depth map as operationally defined by our methods, although the reverse is a possibility.
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This work was supported by the ESPRIT Basic Research Action “InSight II” of the European Commission. Van Doorn is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
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Koenderink, J.J., Van Doorn, A.J. & Kappers, A.M.L. Pictorial surface attitude and local depth comparisons. Perception & Psychophysics 58, 163–173 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211873
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211873