A phenomenological approach to salient maps and illusory contours

Abstract

This paper presents a new general approach to salient maps and illusory contours. We first formulate an energy model for representing line contours with a set of line segments of different geometric redundancy. New items incorporated into the energy are marginal energy, point energy and exchange interaction. Marginal energy and exchange interaction induce several kinds of bound energy, which provides a general solution to the segmentation/grouping/binding problem. Salient maps and illusory contours emerge out of images at some critical points as a kind of phase transition and thus can be detected in parallel at the early vision stages. These phase transitions, with no obvious hysteresis, have interesting behaviour including crossovers. The energy model, providing some intuition to the strategies for visual representation by the brain, may be related to the retinotopic mapping and the functional columnar architecture of the brain cortex and casts some doubts on the present computational theory of vision.