Computational and psychophysical studies towards a theory of human stereopsis

Psychophysical studies are described which pose a strong challenge to models of human stereopsis based on the processing of disparity information within independent spatial frequency tuned binocular channels. These studies support instead the proposal that the processes of human binocular combination integrally relate the extraction of disparity information with the construction of raw primal sketch assertions. This proposal implies binocular combination rules using principles of figural continuity and cross-channel correspondences to disambiguate at a global level matches found independently within spatial frequency channels at a local level. Computer implementations of stereo algorithms based on these rules are described and found to be successful in dealing with a variety of different stereo inputs. The constraints presented by objects which are exploited by these algorithms are discussed. The paper is an abbreviated version of a paper to appear in a special issue of Artificial Intelligence devoted to vision (Mayhew and Frisby, 1980c).

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