Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Stereoscopic occlusion junctions

Nature Neuroscience volume 2, pages 840–843 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

Portions of surfaces in a binocularly viewed scene may be 'half occluded', that is, visible in only one eye. The human visual system uses zones of half occlusion to help segment the visual scene and infer figure–ground relationships at object boundaries. We developed a quantitative model of the depth-discontinuity cue provided by half occlusion. Half occlusions are revealed by two-dimensional interocular displacements of binocularly viewed occlusion junctions, such as T junctions. We derived a formula relating this two-dimensional displacement, or 'pseudodisparity', to binocular disparities and orientations of occluding and occluded contours. In human psychophysical experiments, perceived depth and contour orientation quantitatively depended on pseudodisparity, as predicted by our model, implying that the visual system senses quantitative variations in interocular junction position to reconstruct occlusion geometry.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: A stereopair of a natural scene containing a large number of occlusion junctions.
Figure 2: Examples of stereoscopic half-occlusion junctions. For ease of fusion, the center column presents the left eye view and the side columns present the right eye view.
Figure 3: Geometrical abstraction of a stereoscopic occlusion junction.
Figure 4: Experimental results. Scatter plots of perceived orientation versus predicted orientation of subjective contours for two observers assessing disparity and orientation for the I-junction stimulus from Fig. 2c (see Methods).

References

  1. Wolf, P. R. Elements of Photogrammetry (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Wheatstone, C. Contributions to the physiology of vision: On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved phenomena of binocular vision. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 128, 371–394 (1838).

  3. Von Helmholtz, H. Treatise on Physiological Optics 3rd edn. Vol. 3 (ed. Southall, J. P.) (Optical Society of America, Rochester, 1925).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ogle, K. N. Researches in Binocular Vision (Saunders, Philadelphia, 1950).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Mayhew, J. E. & Longuet-higgins, H. C. A computational model of binocular depth perception. Nature 297, 376–378 (1982).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Rogers, B. J. & Bradshaw, M. F. Vertical disparities, differential perspective and binocular stereopsis. Nature 361, 253–255 (1993).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Belhumeur, P. N. & Mumford, D. in Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 506–512 (IEEE Computer Society, Washington DC, 1992).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lawson, R. B. & Gulick, W. L. Stereopsis and anomalous contour. Vision Res. 7, 271–297 (1967).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Gillam, B. & Borsting, E. The role of monocular regions in stereoscopic displays. Perception 17, 603–608 (1988).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Nakayama, K. & Shimojo, S. Da Vinci stereopsis: Depth and subjective occluding contours from unpaired image points. Vision Res. 30, 1811–1825 (1990).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. Anderson, B. L. & Nakayama, K. Toward a general theory of stereopsis: Binocular matching, occluding contours, and fusion. Psychol. Rev. 101, 414– 445 (1994).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Gillam, B., Blackburn, S. & Nakayama, K. Stereopsis based on monocular gaps: Metrical encoding of depth and slant without matching contours. Vision Res. 39, 493–502 (1999).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. Anderson, B. L. The role of partial occlusion in stereopsis. Nature 367, 365–368 (1994).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. Anderson, B. L. & Julesz, B. A theoretical analysis of illusory contour formation in stereopsis. Psychol. Rev. 102, 705–743 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Huffman, D. A. Impossible objects as nonsense sentences. Mach. Intell. 6, 295–323 (1971).

    Google Scholar 

  16. Clowes, M. B. On seeing things. Artif. Intell. 2, 79– 116 (1971).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Malik, J. Interpreting line drawings of curved objects. Int. J. Comput. Vision 1, 73–103 (1987).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Blakemore, C., Fiorentini, A. & Maffei, L. A second neural mechanism of binocular depth discrimination. J. Physiol. (Lond.) 226, 725– 749 (1972).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  19. Kanizsa, G. Organization in Vision. Essays on Gestalt Perception (Praeger, New York, 1979).

  20. Von der Heydt, R. & Peterhans, E. Mechanisms of contour perception in monkey visual cortex: I. Lines of pattern discontinuity. J. Neurosci. 9, 1731–1748 (1989).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  21. Morgan, M. J. & Castet, E. The aperture problem in stereopsis. Vision Res. 39, 2737–2744 (1997).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Hibbard, P. B. & Langley, K. Plaid slant and inclination thresholds can be predicted from components. Vision Res. 38, 1073–1084 (1998).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  23. Farell, B. Two-dimensional matches from one-dimensional stimulus components in human stereopsis. Nature 395, 689– 693 (1998).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  24. DeAngelis, G. C., Ohzawa, I. & Freeman, R. D. Depth is encoded in the visual cortex by a specialized receptive field structure. Nature 352, 156–159 (1991).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  25. LeVay, S. & Voigt, T. Ocular dominance and disparity coding in cat visual cortex. Vis. Neurosci. 1, 395–414 (1988).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  26. Anderson, B. L. The computation of stereoscopic occlusion relationships. Nature (in press).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Division, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Jitendra Malik

  2. Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 21639, Massachusetts, USA

    Barton L. Anderson & Chad E. Charowhas

Authors
  1. Jitendra Malik
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Barton L. Anderson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Chad E. Charowhas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jitendra Malik or Barton L. Anderson.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Malik, J., Anderson, B. & Charowhas, C. Stereoscopic occlusion junctions. Nat Neurosci 2, 840–843 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/12214

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/12214

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing