January 29, Sunday
12:00 – 13:30
Visual Curve Completion in the Tangent Bundle
Graduate seminar
Lecturer : Guy Ben - Yosef
Affiliation : CS,BGU
Location : 202/37
Host : Graduate Seminar
The ease of seeing conceals many complexities. A fundamental one is the problem of fragmentation – we are able
to recognize objects although they are optically incomplete, e.g., due to occlusions. To overcome this difficulty,
biological and artificial visual systems use a mechanism for contour completion, which has been studied by the
many disciplines of vision science, mostly in an intra-disciplinary fashion. Recent computational, neurophysiological,
and psychophysical studies suggest that completed contours emerge from activation patterns of orientation selective
cells in the primary visual cortex, or V1. In this work we suggest modeling these patterns as 3D curves in the mathematical
continuous space R^2 × S^1, a.k.a. the unit tangent bundle associated with the image plane R^2, that abstracts V1.
Then, we propose that the completed shape may follow physical/biological principles which are conveniently abstracted
and analyzed in this space. We implement our theories by numerical algorithms to show ample experimental results
of visually completed curves in natural and synthetic scenes.