Salient and Multiple Illusory Surfaces

Davi Geiger, Hsing-Kuo Pao, Nava Rubin

Abstract: All illusory surface figures yield a perception of a surface occluding another one or the background. Occluded surfaces yield completion, a phenomena known as amodal completions. It is intriguing that for some images illusory surfaces are perceived, but not for other images. Also, illusory surfaces may have portions occlude. We aim to understand these phenomena. Our approach detects intensity edges and junctions. From the junctions we seek to find an optimal image organization, i.e., multiple ordered surfaces with the ordering accounting for salience. The most salient being the figure, while the other surfaces are classified as background. A decision of which surface is the visible one (on rep) is made locally, at each pixel, allowing the salient surface (figure) to have portions occluded, i.e., with amodal completions. We account for a variety of imagery not explained before.