PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION IN COMPUTER VISION - A REVIEW AND A PROPOSAL FOR A CLASSIFACTORY STRUCTURE

The evolution of perceptual organization in biological vision, and its necessity in advanced computer vision systems, arises from the charac teristic that perception, the extraction of meaning from sensory input , is an intelligent process. This is particularly so for high order or ganisms and, analogically, for more sophisticated computational models . The role of perceptual organization in computer vision systems is ex plored. This is done from four vantage points. First, a brief history of perceptual organization research in both humans and computer vision is offered. Next, a classificatory structure in which to cast percept ual organization research to clarify both the nomenclature and the rel ationships among the many contributions is proposed. Thirdly, the perc eptual organization work in computer vision in the context of this cla ssificatory structure is reviewed. Finally, the array of computational techniques applied to perceptual organization problems in computer vi sion is surveyed.