The status of the minimum principle in the theoretical analysis of visual perception.

Hatfield, Gary; Epstein, William

doi:10.1037/0033-2909.97.2.155

Cited by 149 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…Yet, in a task in which subjects had to draw the contours of the perceived completion, none of the subjects showed a preference for interpretation A, whereas most of the subjects preferred interpretation B. Boselie and Wouterlood rightly remarked that the results do not necessarily imply a rejection of the global-minimum principle as such. This is in line with the work of Hatfield and Epstein (1985) who stated that a straightforward test of the global minimum principle is not possible. The principle relies heavily on assumptions about what simplicity actually is.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…The perceptual complexity refers to the complexity of an interpretation in relation to the pattern, whereas the memory complexity of an interpretation is determined by the memory space required to store that interpretation. To a certain extent, the proposed distinction corresponds with the distinction between phenomenal simplicity and descriptive economy made by Hatfield and Epstein (1985). However, the term phenomenal simplicity generally expresses a tendency to simplicity of shape.…”

Section: Perceptual Complexitymentioning

confidence: 97%

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Integrating Global and Local Aspects of Visual Occlusion

1994

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The phenomenon of visual occlusion has frequently been studied by means of twodimensional line drawings. These drawings may elicit various interpretations. Sometimes a mosaic of shapes is seen, sometimes a shape that partly occludes another shape. In the latter case, observers often have a clear idea about the form of the partly occluded shape. Local and global pattern aspects both seem to be decisive with respect to the preferred interpretation. An attempt is made to integrate these aspects by applying the global-minimum principle to the perceptual complexity of three distinct components of those pattern interpretations: (i) The internal structure, dealing with each of the shapes separately, (ii) the external structure, dealing with the positional relation between these shapes, and (iii) the virtual structure, dealing with the occluded parts of the shapes. The perceptual complexity of each of these three components can be expressed in terms of structural information. The hypothesis that the perceptually preferred interpretation is the one for which the total information load is minimal is tested on many patterns stemming from different studies on pattern completion.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Perceptual Complexitymentioning

confidence: 97%

Integrating Global and Local Aspects of Visual Occlusion

1994

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“…As I specify in the next section, this hierarchically recursive search for regularity creates the problem that, to compute simplest SIT codes, a superexponential amount of time seems to be required (see also ref. 32). The following sample of SIT codes of one and the same symbol string may give a gist of this problem.…”

Section: Sit Coding Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Transparallel processing by hyperstrings

Helm

2004

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Human vision research aims at understanding the brain processes that enable us to see the world as a structured whole consisting of separate objects. To explain how humans organize a visual pattern, structural information theory starts from the idea that our visual system prefers the organization with the simplest descriptive code, that is, the code that captures a maximum of visual regularity. Empirically, structural information theory gained support from psychological data on a wide variety of perceptual phenomena, but theoretically, the computation of guaranteed simplest codes remained a troubling problem. Here, the graph-theoretical concept of ''hyperstrings'' is presented as a key to the solution of this problem. A hyperstring is a distributed data structure that allows a search for regularity in O(2 N ) strings as if only one string of length N were concerned. Thereby, hyperstrings enable transparallel processing, a previously uncharacterized form of processing that might also be a form of cognitive processing.

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“…This might seem curious, considering that Leclerc's MDL formulation appears less ad hoc than Mumford and Shah's. The simplicity principle driving his approach has also been suggested as a basis for understanding human visual perception [35]. More importantly, perhaps, it provides a framework in which more sophisticated image analysis problems may be formulated [48].…”

Section: Leclerc's Work In Computer Visionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in Piecewise Smooth Image Reconstruction

Juengling¹

2000

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Advances and new insights into algorithms for piecewise smooth image reconstruction are presented. Such algorithms fit a piecewise smooth function to image data without prior knowledge of the number of regions or the location of region boundaries in the best fitting function. This is a difficult model selection problem since the number of parameters of possible solutions varies widely.The approach followed in this work was proposed by Yvan Leclerc. It uses the Minimum Description Length principle to make the reconstruction problem wellposed-the best fitting function yields the shortest encoding of the image data. In order to derive a code length formula, the class of functions is restricted to piecewise polynomial. The resulting optimization problem may have many local minima, and a good initial approximation is required in order to find acceptable solutions. Good initial approximations may be generated at the cost of solving a sequence of related optimization problems, as prescribed by a continuation method.Several problems with this approach are identified and addressed. First, success or failure of the continuation method is found to be sensitive to the choice of objective function parameters. Second, the optimization method used in prior work may fail to converge, and, third, it converges too slowly to be useful in many vision applications.I address the first problem in three different ways. First, a revised continuation method is less sensitive to parameter choice. Second, I show how to move control over success or failure from the objective function parameters to the continuation method.Third, a new objective function is derived which includes one parameter instead of the two parameters used in prior work. Experimental results show that all measures improve robustness with respect to parameter choice.

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The status of the minimum principle in the theoretical analysis of visual perception.

Cited by 149 publications

References 86 publications

Integrating Global and Local Aspects of Visual Occlusion

Integrating Global and Local Aspects of Visual Occlusion

Transparallel processing by hyperstrings

Advances in Piecewise Smooth Image Reconstruction

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