Global and local cues for contour grouping

• Applicant: Dr. Ingo Fründ
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2012 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222079379

The shapes of objects form one of the central phenomenological aspects of visual experience. However, natural images typically do not contain complete shapes. Instead it is often possible to determine a collection of local edge elements in those images. Contour grouping refers to the process of deciding which local edge elements belong the same object boundary and in which sequence the edges form the boundary. Previous approaches to contour grouping focused primarily on local properties of edge pairs along a contour. In the proposed project, we plan to extend these approaches to incorporate the effect of global properties of contours. Such global properties might be the fact that a contour surrounds a closed region in an image or might be overall properties of the resulting shape such as smoothness. We intend to compare the predictions from computer algorithms that perform contour grouping to the performance of human observers. This way, we hope to identify the features of a collection of edge elements that give rise to the perceptual impression of a unique and realistic shape.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Canada
• Host: Professor James H Elder, Ph.D.