Recognizing the partially seen
When we open our eyes in the morning and take in that first scene of the day, we don’t give much thought to the fact that our brain is processing the objects within our field of view with great efficiency and that it is compensating for a lack of information about our surroundings — all in order to allow us to go about our daily functions. The glass of water you left on the nightstand when preparing for bed is now partially blocked from your line of sight by your alarm clock, yet you know that it is a glass. This seemingly simple ability for humans to recognize partially occluded objects — defined in this situation as the effect of one object in a 3-D space blocking another object from view — has been a complicated problem for the computer vision community. Martin Schrimpf, a graduate student in the DiCarlo lab in the...