Recognizing and Segmenting Objects in Clutter

M.J. Bravo and H. Farid

Vision Research, 44(4):385-396, 2004

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When viewing a cluttered scene, observers may not be able to segment whole objects prior to recognition. Instead, they may segment and recognize these objects in a piecemeal way. Here we test whether observers can use the appearance of one object part to predict the location and appearance of other object parts. During several training sessions, observers studied an object against a blank background. They then viewed this object against a background of clutter that camouflaged some parts of the object while leaving other parts salient. The observer's task was to find the camouflaged part. We varied the symmetry of the salient part with the expectation that as this symmetry decreased, the information about the camouflaged part's location and appearance would increase and this would facilitate search. Our results suggest that observers can use the salient part to predict the location, but not the appearance, of the camouflaged part.