Seeing in 3D

The world is represented via two dimensional projections onto the retina yet we recognise objects situated at unfamiliar viewpoints. There are currently two theories of visual object recognition:-View-point independent and view-point dependent. View-point independent posits the following,"On these theories, recognition consists in the abstraction of a structural specification of the object perceived and a match of that specification to a memorial specification.Such theories are called viewpointindependent because they predict that, as long as the crucial structural information can be abstracted from the percept, then there should be no variation in recognition speed and accuracy across unfamiliar rotations of the presented object (where rotations are either in depth or along the picture plane." According to viewpoint-independent theories, the representations that facilitate object recognition are specifications of the three-dimensional structure of seen objects abstracted from the two dimensional array of the retinal image. Nishihara and Marr(1978) proposed an account with regards to the formatting of information about three-dimensional object shape in memory.They believe that objects are represented by a coordinate system the axes of which are centred on major parts of the object.Only the object is represented and not the viewers relative position.Each of the major parts of an object would be represented by cylinders so that... "a person is represented as six main cylindrical shapes.....The important point is that objects are represented in terms of their major axes of elongation as cylindrical parts centred on those axes." The model s predicts recognition performance will be equivalent across different views as long as information about the major axes of elongation of the objects is retrievable from those views.An alternative view within the VP independent paradigm is that of Biederman and Lowe(1985) who posits 36 shapes,or 'geons' as he terms them,representing what Lowe calls non-accidental features of objects." According to Lowe, objects have many aspects that remain constant even when seen from different distances and points of view. For instance, in many different projections of a book, the parts that correspond to the books edges remain parallel. Also, symmetrical objects look symmetrical despite widely varying changes in distance and angle. Acoin seen from different angles may project sometimes a circular and sometimes an elliptical image (and sometimes a thin rectangular image) but either way, the images retain the symmetry of the coin. Lowe defined about a half-dozen of such non-accidental properties of visually presented objects. Based on these non-accidental properties, Biederman devised his system of geons, examples of which include cylinders, cones, and prisms.Biederman and his colleagues predict that as long as such geon information is recoverable from a view of a previously seen object, different rotations of the object should not affect recognition. Thus if, for example, you had seen a coffee mug for the first time, successive views of the mug would facilitate recognition equally as long as both the body and handle geons of the mug were extractable from the retinal array. Biederman predicts that, as long as the handle is in view,rotational deviations from the original presentation will not affect recognition. Thus the theoryis

a viewpoint-independent theory of visual object recognition. Many studies, however, have demonstrated viewpoint-dependent effects on recognition." Bartram (1974 1976), "was to find that when subjects learned a set of novel polygonal shapes at a single rotation, reaction times for familiarunfamiliar judgments on the shapes rotated in the picture plane,depended on the degree of rotation from the original orientation. Bartram (1974) found that subjects reaction times in a naming task decreased more rapidly across practice trials in which each of the eight blocks presented the object from the same view as opposed to blocks in which pictures of objects were seen in different views.Bartram (1976) investigated recognition performance across changes in viewpoint in a sequential matching paradigm. Subjects made samedifferent judgments on pairs of line drawings of objects, members of which were presented sequentially. Reaction times were faster for identical pictures of the same object than for pictures of the same object appearing in differing viewpoints. Jolicoeur (1985) found that naming times for line drawings of naturally occurring objects increased as the drawings were further from the canonical upright views of the objects.Palmer et al. (1981) studied the recognition of familiar objects rotated in depth around their vertical axes. The researchers established independently each objects canonical view via subjects ratings of preferred view. In subsequent tests, they found that the subjects naming times decreased as the rotation of the objects away from their canonical views increased. Evidence of viewpoint-dependent effects in recognition has led researchers to hypothesize that recognition involves the alignment of the perceptual representation to either a single canonical view (Palmer et al. 1981), or to multiple views (Tarr and Blthoff 1995; Tarr and Pinker 1989). Both single and multiple view theories posit normalization mechanisms underlying object recognition." Another influential study is that of Shepard and Cooper 1982) who had subjects look at simultaneously presented pairs of objects. The second member of each pair was either the same as the first or a mirror image. Further, pair members could differ from each other in their rotations in depth and in the picture plane. The researchers found that the time it took for subjects to make samedifferent judgments increased monotonically with increases of rotational displacement between pair members. Shepard and colleagues took this reaction time data as evidence that subjects were rotating mental images to see if they would match the stimulus. Analogously, then, recognition may involve the rotation of a percept to match it against one or more canonical views stored in memory. The evidence suggest that the dependence theory best explains the phenomena though studies are ongoing.