Early Cognitive Vision

In this monograph we present an Early Cognitive Vision framework that aims at providing a rich and reliable scene representation from visual information. This framework preserves conflicting hypothesis in its early stages, and makes use of feedback mechanisms between different visual processes and layers of representation to achieve disambiguation. The first part presents how symbolic local image descriptors are extracted from the responses of early vision filters, and how perceptual grouping constraints can be applied to the resulting image representation. A second part discusses the use of stereopsis to reconstruct an equivalent 3D representation of visual information. Interactions between perceptual grouping, stereopsis and 3D reconstruction processes are discussed. The third part integrates visual information across time to further disambiguate the representation. This framework has been used success-fully in several contexts that are discussed in the conclusion of this book.