Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/S07254/01
Title:	Mechanisms of shading and texture analysis in the perception of 3-D surfaces
Principal Investigator:	Schofield, Professor AJ
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	School of Psychology
Organisation:	University of Birmingham
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 April 2003	Ends:	30 September 2006	Value (£):	149,833
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Vision & Senses - ICT appl.
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:	GR/S07261/01
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Complex, mobile, intelligent systems, whether animal, human or robotic, typically need to interact behaviourally with the 3-D world around them. A prerequisite for behaviour is to derive from sensory input an appropriate and unambiguous description or representation of the scene that will enable the selection and execution of actions. The type of representation required depends on the task in hand but for many purposes it will involve a description of the 3-D shape and form of the light-reflecting surfaces around the viewer. The problem of extracting shape-from-shading is difficult and ambiguous because there are too many unknowns. However, when the surface has texture, changes in local luminance produced by variation in 3-D surface orientation are always accompanied by changes in the luminance amplitude (local contrast) of the texture, This fact has previously been overlooked but we conjecture that this co-variation, which could be directly detected by early visual mechanisms, plays an important role in disambiguating surface representations. We shall map the depth profiles produced by modulations of shading and contrast in different phase relationships and then use psychophysical methods to explore the interactions between these combined cues and stereoscopic depth. We expect the results to have an impact on the understanding of human, animal and artificial vision.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.bham.ac.uk