Research Directions

In this lab we investigate various aspects of depth perception, perceptual organization and object perception. We are interested in questions such as, how do we reconstruct meaningful percepts from the visual information that we get from the environment. Due to the presence of opaque objects in the world, some parts of distant objects are hidden by closer objects. We are interested in studying process that help recover a coherent scene despite spatio-temporal gaps in the input visual information.
We are also interested in investigating the bridge between the realm of perceptual organization, which has a strong holistic component, and information acquired by eye movements, which has been shown to consist of fixations that are discrete and serial. The goal of this research direction is to find the information metrics at the points of fixation that are indicators for the visual system to translate the discrete information into a holistic perception.

Research Projects:
Please click on the links below for further details:

• Exploring Perception in 3D Virtual Spaces
  Immersive 3D environments allow more objects (~1000) to be displayed than 2D displays used in traditional psychophysical experiments (~50). For designing efficient virtual reality user interfaces, in collaboration with Rupak Majumdar (MPI-SWS), we are investigating perception in virtual 3D spaces.

• Spatio-Temporal Interpolation 
  Study on shape and size perception for moving, partially occluded objects in which only bits and pieces of the moving object are seen at any given time and place.

• Perceptual Organization and Eye Movements 
  Here we are investigating the bridge between the realm of perceptual organization, which has a strong holistic component, and information acquired by eye movements, which has been shown to consist of fixations that are discrete and serial. The goal of this research direction is to find the information metrics at the points of fixation that are indicators for the visual system to translate the discrete information into a holistic perception.

• HCI / Usability studies 
  The goal of this project is design augmented reality based systems for giving factory workers online feedback to improve their performance.

• Error rates in Fingerprint recognition 
  The goal of this project is to identify visual features that determine the difficulty of match for a given pair of fingerprints.

• Spatial Aesthetics 
  Study on effects of axes of symmetry of frames on visual search tasks.

• Generalization of viewpoint in object perception 
  The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which object-recognition can be generalized from a canonical to a non-canonical view, and vice-versa.

• Influence of perceptual factors on metacognition 
  Study investigating the influence of various visual factors on metacognition by using measures such as judgment of learning.

• Figure Ground Organization 
  Studying cues that help decide the relative depth across shared contours for various image regions.
  • Extremal Edges
  • Gradient Cuts

For EU Project 293901 please see this website POEM