Visual Illusions

The above stereo illusion was chosen as one of the top 10 finalists in the 2009 best visual illusion of the year contest.

The above illusion is from our paper

  • H. Ishikawa and D Geiger (2006). Illusory volumes in human stereo perception, Vision Research,vol:46, issues 1 and 2, pp: 171-178.

    • These illusions above aim at showing that the formation of illusory contour is indeed the formation of illusory surfaces. The stereo output are surfaces, the formation of the illusory surfaces from stereo uses feature matches to infer the perceived surfaces. In the top ilusion shows that illusory surfaces emerge that could not be seen from monocular images. Illusory contours is therefore the boundary of illusory surfaces. The bottom illusion shows that sometimes illusory surfaces can emerge even without illusory contours (when the boundaries are not illusory).

    More work on illusory surfaces is described in publication

  • D. Geiger, K. Kumaran, H-K. Pao, and N. Rubin (1999). The Shape of Illusory Figures. Proc. of IEEE Intl. Conf. on Image Processing (ICIP’99), Kobe, Japan.

  • D. Geiger, H-K. Pao, and N. Rubin (1998). Organization of Multiple Illusory Surfaces. Proc. of the IEEE Comp. Vision and Pattern Recognition, Santa Barbara.

  • K. Kumaran, D. Geiger, and L. Gurvits (1996). Illusory Surfaces. Network: Computation in Neural Systems, Vol. 7.

  • D. Geiger and K. Kumaran (1996). Visual Organization of Illusory Surfaces. Proc. of 4th European Conf. on Comp. Vision. Cambridge, UK.

  • D. Geiger, K. Kumaran and L. Parida (1996). A Computational View of Visual Organization for Figure/Ground Separation. Proc. of the IEEE Conf. on Comp. Vision and Pattern Recognition , San Francisco.