Gestalt Vision Experiments from an Image Processing Perspective

In the late 19th century, the Gestalt Psychology rebelled against the popular new science of Psychophysics. The Gestalt revolution used many fascinating visual examples to illustrate that the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts. The physical interpretation of sensations and their quantification by JND’s and Weber fractions were met with innumerable examples in which two identical physical stimuli did not look the same. The debate continues today with proponents of both physical, pixel-based thinking and perceptual, image based thinking. Image processing concepts can provide a new way of analyzing famous Gestalt displays. By this way of thinking, simple multi-resolution spatial processes can account for the various appearances of identical stimuli by analyzing the spatial properties of the entire image. Benary’s Cross, Adelson’s diamonds and Logvinenko’s gradients can all be modeled by the low-, middleand high-spatial-frequency components of the image. Pixel based analogs of physics and object cognition can be replace by familiar image processing concepts, such as multiresolution spatial comparisons.