The cortical processing of illusory contours provides a unique window for exploring the brain mechanisms underlying visual perception. Previous electrophysiological single-cell recordings demonstrate that a subgroup of cells in macaque V1 and V2 signal the presence of illusory contours, whereas recent human brain imaging studies reveal higher-order visual cortices playing a central role in illu...

The spatial relationships of contours play important roles in many areas such as extracting topographic features from contour maps, automatically identifying elevations of scanned contours, et al.. In those areas, one key issue is making computers identify the relationships of contours. The spatial relationships of contours are usually represented by contour tree. Contour tree is essentially a ...

Previous experimental studies have provided evidence that closed contours are easier to detect than open contours in random-element displays, and previous theoretical studies have shown that these effects might be explained by an active neural mechanism (e.g., a "reverberating neural circuit") sensitive to closure. To test this hypothesis, detection thresholds were measured in five experiments ...

Overlaid plots of iso-contours in individual members of a scalar ensemble field are a popular concept to visualize the data uncertainty. However, such plots do not allow concluding on the spatial cumulative probability distribution of the iso-contours, and they cannot reveal distribution characteristics like spread and topology for huge amounts of contours. In this paper, we propose a new visua...

From our daily experience, it is very clear that relative motion cues can contribute to correctly identifying object boundaries and perceiving depth. Motion-defined contours are not only generated by the motion of objects in a scene but also by the movement of an observer's head and body (motion parallax). However, the neural mechanism involved in detecting these contours is still unknown. To e...