Abstract
When a human observer views a Kanizsa square under appropriate viewing conditions, the bright square appears to be closer than its inducing pac man wedges (Figure 1). Much experimental evidence suggests that the square’s apparent brightness and depth covary relative to those of the picture background (Bradley and Dumais, 1984; Kanizsa, 1955, 1974; Purghé and Coren, 1992). This interaction between the illusory contours that frame the square, the brightness percept that fills it in, and the depthful pop-out of the square from its background illustrate in a dramatic way how fundamentally different are biological vision processes from those of traditional machine vision algorithms. The present article sketches an explanation of this percept as part of a larger theory of biological vision that develops a solution of the classical figure-ground problem (Grossberg, 1993, 1994).
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This research was supported in part by ARPA (ONR N00014-92-J-4015) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR NOOOI4-91-J-4100). The author wishes to thank Cynthia E. Bradford for her valuable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
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References
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Grossberg, S. (1994). Why Bright Kanizsa Squares Look Closer: Consistency of Segmentations and Surfaces in 3-D Vision. In: Marinaro, M., Morasso, P.G. (eds) ICANN ’94. ICANN 1994. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2097-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2097-1_1
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