The Role of Surface-Based Representations of Shape in Visual Object Recognition

Abstract

This study contrasted the role of surfaces and volumetric shape primitives in three-dimensional object recognition. Observers (N = 50) matched subsets of closed contour fragments, surfaces, or volumetric parts to whole novel objects during a whole–part matching task. Three factors were further manipulated: part viewpoint (either same or different between component parts and whole objects), surface occlusion (comparison parts contained either visible surfaces only, or a surface that was fully or partially occluded in the whole object), and target–distractor similarity. Similarity was varied in terms of systematic variation in nonaccidental (NAP) or metric (MP) properties of individual parts. Analysis of sensitivity (d′) showed a whole–part matching advantage for surface-based parts and volumes over closed contour fragments—but no benefit for volumetric parts over surfaces. We also found a performance cost in matching volumetric parts to wholes when the volumes showed surfaces that were occluded in the whole object. The same pattern was found for both same and different viewpoints, and regardless of target–distractor similarity. These findings challenge models in which recognition is mediated by volumetric part-based shape representations. Instead, we argue that the results are consistent with a surface-based model of high-level shape representation for recognition.

Square bananas, blue horses: the relative weight of shape and color in concept recognition and representation

“…As far as materials assessment is concerned, first of all it is worth noting that image manipulation software products (e.g., GIMP 2, the open-source raster graphics editor we used) do not allow fixing shape and color modifications to the same degree of distortions for both the properties. Secondly, even if in literature we did not find paradigms similar to ours, for sure volumetric properties typically affect objects recognition more than surface properties ( Banno and Saiki, 2015 ; Reppa et al, 2015 ; Rosselli et al, 2015 ; Saarela and Landy, 2015 ; Schlangen and Barenholtz, 2015 ). However, as far as our specific hypotheses were concerned, it was crucial to ascertain that the perceptual complexity of both the color- and the shape-modified stimuli was comparable across stimuli (fruits-vegetables and animals).…”

Female Body Dissatisfaction and Attentional Bias to Body Images Evaluated Using Visual Search

“…Regarding our search stimuli, all body images used in our study were shown in identical poses from a single viewing perspective (frontoparallel plane) and all bodies had Caucasian skin tones. Both the viewpoint and surface characteristics of objects has been found to profoundly influence both brain responses and recognition performance across a variety of stimulus classes -including bodies (Chan et al, 2004;Favelle et al, 2011;Reppa et al, 2015). Ethnicity-linked visual cues have been found to differentially affect search behavior depending upon one's own ethnicity (Zhou et al, 2015).…”

Computational Model for Human 3D Shape Perception From a Single Specular Image

“…It would be interesting to use the image-based shape manipulation method based on the orientation field (Vergne et al, 2016) to compare the recovered and human-perceived shapes. It would also be interesting to model and examine human shape perception from the viewpoint of surface-based representations hypothesis (Leek et al, 2005, 2009; Reppa et al, 2015). Second, the proposed shape recovery algorithm will be useful for computer vision methods.…”