Abstract

Assumptions of local rigidity and smoothness have been used to explain how the visual system reconstructs a representation of physical objects and their motion from spatially sampled images. Using moving stimuli of limited complexity, viewed through several spatially separated apertures, we investigated the effectiveness of various constraints on the reconstruction process. These constraints are essential when the image within each aperture does not permit a unique determination of local optical flow. Our results indicate that, when the image contains sufficient information, translation motion is perceived vertically and can be effectively integrated over large spatial separations. For example, a translating hidden corner viewed through two rectangular apertures is perceived as a single rigid object. In contrast, pure rotation of smooth contours is perceived with strong biases. In addition, observers are generally not able to integrate pure, uniform rotational motion information from different, nonoverlapping apertures. We found that these results are affected by the complexity of the object motion. Objects are more likely to be perceived correctly when the motion is more complex, e.g., has nonuniform velocity or consists of a combination of translation and rotation. We propose a simple statistical framework for describing these results.

© 1990 Optical Society of America