Shape, Structure, and Skeletons

Jacob Feldman

Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Saturday, June 23, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Singleton Room, Roberts Hall, CMU campus
(IGERT Research Symposium Featured Talk)

Abstract

The mental representation of shape is a critical problem in visual perception, but is still surprisingly poorly understood. For example it is widely accepted that a critical part of shape representation is the division of a shape into component parts, but the computational rules by which the visual system seems to accomplish this basic task are complicated and heterogeneous, and lack a principled theory. In this talk I'll present a new approach to shape representation, based on Bayesian estimation of the shape skeleton, that among other advantages entails an intuitive division of shapes into parts. The approach has natural extensions and applications into shape categorization, motion interpretation, and perceptual organization, some of which I'll discuss and illustrate.

Speaker Bio

Jacob Feldman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers - New Brunswick. He received his A.B. degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. from M.I.T., and has been at Rutgers ever since. His research interests lie primarily in perceptual organization, shape representation, concept learning, and in the theoretical foundations of mental representation. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (1998) and the National Academy of Science's Troland Research Award (2005).

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Last modified: Fri Jun 15 00:29:43 EDT 2007