A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SALIENT MAPS AND ILLUSORY CONTOURS

This paper presents a new general approach to salient maps and illusor y contours. We first formulate an energy model for representing line c ontours with a set of line segments of different geometric redundancy. New items incorporated into the energy are marginal energy, point ene rgy and exchange interaction. Marginal energy and exchange interaction induce several kinds of bound energy, which provides a general soluti on to the segmentation/grouping/binding problem. Salient maps and illu sory contours emerge out of images at some critical points as a kind o f phase transition and thus can be detected in parallel at the early v ision stages. These phase transitions, with no obvious hysteresis, hav e interesting behaviour including crossovers. The energy model, provid ing some intuition to the strategies for visual representation by the brain, may be related to the retinotopic mapping and the functional co lumnar architecture of the brain cortex and casts some doubts on the p resent computational theory of vision.