A Variational Model for Capturing Illusory Contours Using Curvature

Illusorycontours,suchastheclassicalKanizsatriangleandsquare[9],areintrinsicphenomenainhuman vision. These contours are not completely defined by real object boundaries, but also include illusory boundaries which are not explicitly present in the images. Therefore, the major computational challenge of capturing illusory contours is to complete the illusory boundaries. In this paper, we propose a level set based variational model to capture a typical class of illusory contours such as Kanizsa triangle. Our model completes missing boundaries in a smooth way via Euler’s elastica, and also preserves corners by incorporating curvature information of object boundaries. Our model can capture illusory contours regardless of whether the missing boundaries are straight lines or curves. We compare the choice of the second order Euler’s elastica used in our model and that of the first order Euler’s elastica developed in Nitzberg-Mumford-Shiota’s work on the problem of segmentation with de...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JMIV
• Authors: Wei Zhu, Tony F. Chan
• Keywords: Illusory Boundaries, Illusory Contours, JMIV 2007, Object Boundaries