Beyond the uniqueness assumption: Ambiguity representation and redundancy elimination in the computation of a covering sample of salient contour cycles

Perceptual organization provides an intermediate representation of data by means of object- and goal-independent information. The lack of complete inf ormation makes perceptual organization an intrinsically ambiguous process w hich invalidates the uniqueness assumption and requires instead the generat ion of multiple solutions. This raises the issue of eliminating redundancie s which, in a recursive algorithm, might otherwise cause combinatorial expl osion of the search space. These aspects of perceptual organization are ill ustrated in the context of cycle detection in a contour graph. A provably c orrect algorithm for this problem is proposed, (C) 1999 Academic Press.