Horizon estimation: perceptual and computational experiments

The human visual system is able to quickly and robustly infer a wealth of scene information – the scene "gist" – already after 100 milliseconds of image presentation. Here, we investigated the ability to estimate the position of the horizon in briefly shown images. Being able to judge the horizon position quickly and accurately will help in inferring viewer orientation and scene structure in general and thus might be an important factor of scene gist. In the first, perceptual study, we investigated participants’ horizon estimates after a 150 millisecond, masked presentation of typical outdoor scenes from different scene categories. All images were shown in upright, blurred, inverted, and cropped conditions to investigate the influence of different information types on the perceptual decision. We found that despite individual variations, horizon estimates were fairly consistent across participants and conformed well to annotated data. In addition, inversion resulted ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: APGV
• Authors: Christian Herdtweck, Christian Wallraven
• Keywords: APGV 2010, Horizon Estimates, Horizon Position, Scene Gist, Visualization