Perception of 3d Surface Geometry

     In a short treatise on visual perception, Ernst Mach wrote that, "we do not see optical images in an optical space, but we perceive the bodies round about us in their many and sensuous qualities." A central puzzle in vision is how the brain infers properties of the world ("bodies round about us") from uncertain and ambiguous sensory data ("optical images in an optical space").

     One of the central problems being studied in my lab is how the visual system perceives the 3-D shapes and orientations of surfaces in a scene. We have studied a number of problems, including the perception of 3-D object motion from the motion of cast shadows, the perception of surface shape from contours, the perception of surface shape from texture and the perception of shape from shading.

     We are currently studying how the visual system integrates the information from different visual cues to generate a unified percept of 3D surface orientation and shape. Our work attempts to relate theoretical analyses of ideal cue integration strategies to the strategies used by human observers as revealed by psychophysical studies.

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