RECOVERY OF 3-D SHAPE FROM BINOCULAR DISPARITY AND STRUCTURE-FROM-MOTION

Four experiments were conducted to examine the integration of depth in formation from binocular stereopsis and structure from motion (SFM), u sing stereograms simulating transparent cylindrical objects. We found that the judged depth increased when either rotational or translationa l motion was added to a display, but the increase was greater for rota ting (SFM) displays. Judged depth decreased as texture element density increased for static and translating stereo displays, but it stayed r elatively constant for rotating displays. This result indicates that S FM may facilitate stereo processing by helping to resolve the stereo c orrespondence problem. Overall, the results from these experiments pro vide evidence for a cooperative relationship between SFM and binocular disparity in the recovery of 3-D relationships from 2-D images. These findings indicate that the processing of depth information from SFM a nd binocular disparity is not strictly modular, and thus theories of c ombining visual information that assume strong modularity or independe nce cannot accurately characterize all instances of depth perception f rom multiple sources.