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Prerequisites

Approach

Course Outline

This syllabus is based on the Fall 1994 offering of the course (as COMP 790) by Prof. Marshall. Future offerings may have a different instructor and may cover different topics.

Prerequisites
Graduate students in other departments, as well as those in computer science, are encouraged to take the seminar. Students in cognitive psychology may count the course toward their requirement of 4 courses in cognitive psychology. Faculty members and postdocs are also welcome. Some prior exposure to material on vision, covering the following topics (as in the vision segment of COMP 665 or in PSYC 209A) would be helpful:

• Structure of the human visual system
• Psychophysics: brightness, color, motion, stereo, shape from X
• Psychophysical experiments
• Display linearization and JNDs
• Illusions
• Color models
• Scale in vision

Approach
Visual perception is one of the most active, challenging, and exciting areas of scientific research today. The field is concerned with understanding how the light that bounces around our world gets transformed into the vivid, informative experience that we call vision. The field is highly interdisciplinary, involving psychophysics, neurophysiology, and computational models.

This graduate course surveys the behavioral, neurobiological, and computational aspects of visual perception in humans and animals. We cover the following topics, some briefly, others in more detail:

• depth perception: how we see in 3D;
• motion perception and visual event perception;
• shape and form perception;
• recognition and definition of objects;
• receptive fields, stimulus preferences, and visual context;
• boundary, orientation, and curvature perception;
• perception of color and brightness;
• texture perception;
• visual segmentation;
• perception of transparency, shadows, and specularities;
• psychophysics of vision;
• physiology and architecture of the retina-geniculate-cortex pathway;
• representation, coding, and models in vision;
• multiresolution and multiscale image representations;
• parallel pathways for processing of visual information.

The course will be of interest to students with many different research backgrounds and plans, particularly in computer science, neurobiology, or psychology. Besides students of perception per se, the course should also be of interest to students in computer graphics, image analysis, or computer vision, because it will help those students understand (1) how to make humans and computers interact more effectively, (2) how to build better computer vision systems by using principles in common between human and computer vision, (3) how to build better visualization tools, and (4) how to build better displays according to principles of "inverse graphics."

The seminar workload consists of readings (primarily from books, supplemented with some papers from research journals), class discussions and participation, individual and group assignments, and a group project.

Course Outline

• Experimental methods in visual psychophysics and neurophysiology
• Computational modeling of visual perception
• Perception of boundaries, orientation, illusory contours, & curvature
• Motion perception
• Depth perception
• Perception of brightness, color, and texture
• Visual filling-in and completion
• Transparency, specularity, shadows, & texture
• Segmentation, grouping, attention
• Perceptual organization, form perception, and scale
• Object recognition