Measuring Convexity for Figure/Ground Separation

  • Authors:
  • H. Pao;D. Geiger;N. Rubin

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICCV '99 Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision-Volume 2 - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In human perception, convex surfaces have a strong tendency to be perceived as the "figure". Convexity has a stronger influence on figural organization than other global shape properties, such as symmetry ([9]). And yet, there has been very little work on convexity properties in computer vision.We present a model for figure/ground segregation which exhibits a preference for convex regions as the figure (i.e., the foreground). The model also shows a preference for smaller regions to be selected as figures, which is also known to hold for human visual perception (e.g., Koffka [11]). The model is based on the machinery of Markov random fields/random walks/diffusion processes, so that the global shape properties are obtained via local and stochastic computations. Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on ambiguous figure/ground displays which were not captured before. In particular, in ambiguous displays where neither region is strictly convex, the model shows preference to the "more convex" region, thus offering a continuous measure of convexity in agreement with human perception.