Image segmentation and lightness perception

Barton L. Anderson () and Jonathan Winawer
Additional contact information
Barton L. Anderson: School of Psychology
Jonathan Winawer: Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Nature, 2005, vol. 434, issue 7029, 79-83

Abstract: Can you trust your eyes? The perception of lightness, or surface albedo, is a hotly debated aspect of visual awareness. The amount of light reaching our eyes is a combination of the light striking an object, the light it reflects (the albedo), and the effects of intervening media. The controversy is about whether the brain represents these different factors explicitly as a set of overlapping layers when it computes surface albedo. The cover image, a variant of the largest lightness illusion so far developed, demonstrates the dramatic role that layered image representations can play in the perception of lightness. It is hard to believe, but the texture within the figures of the two opposed images is the same: it is context that makes one appear black, the other white. For a more striking rendition of this illusion, see the online QuickTime movies in Supplementary Information.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03271 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:434:y:2005:i:7029:d:10.1038_nature03271

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature03271

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().