The authors, world-renowned scientists, have already produced a dozen books on symmetry for professionals as well as lay persons, for grownups as well as children, in English, Russian, German, Hungarian, and Swedish languages. They provide this attractive account of symmetry in few words and many oOe1/4OCO as many as 650 oOe1/4OCO images in full color from the most diverse corners of our globe. An encounter with this book will open up a whole new experience for the reader, who will never look at the world with the same eyes as before."
In the arts and sciences, as well as in our daily lives, symmetry has made a profound and lasting impact. Likewise, a computational treatment of symmetry and group theory (the ultimate mathematical formalization of symmetry) has the potential to play an important role in computational sciences. Though the term Computational Symmetry was formally defined a decade ago by the first author, referring to algorithmic treatment of symmetries, seeking symmetry from digital data has been attempted for over four decades. Computational symmetry on real world data turns out to be challenging enough that, after decades of effort, a fully automated symmetry-savvy system remains elusive for real world applications. The recent resurging interests in computational symmetry for computer vision and computer graphics applications have shown promising results. Recognizing the fundamental relevance and potential power that computational symmetry affords, we offer this survey to the computer vision and computer graphics communities. This survey provides a succinct summary of the relevant mathematical theory, a historic perspective of some important symmetry-related ideas, a partial yet timely report on the state of the arts symmetry detection algorithms along with its first quantitative benchmark, a diverse set of real world applications, suggestions for future directions and a comprehensive reference list.
In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used by the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. Michael Leyton's arguments about the nature of perception and cognition are fascinating, exciting, and sure to be controversial. In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used by the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. He elaborates a system of rules by which the conversion to memory takes place and presents a number of detailed case studies--in perception, linguistics, art, and even political subjugation--that support these rules. Leyton observes that the mind assigns to any shape a causal history explaining how the shape was formed. We cannot help but perceive a deformed can as a dented can. Moreover, by reducing the study of shape to the study of symmetry, he shows that symmetry is crucial to our everyday cognitive processing. Symmetry is the means by which shape is converted into memory. Perception is usually regarded as the recovery of the spatial layout of the environment. Leyton, however, shows that perception is fundamentally the extraction of time from shape. In doing so, he is able to reduce the several areas of computational vision purely to symmetry principles. Examining grammar in linguistics, he argues that a sentence is psychologically represented as a piece of causal history, an archeological relic disinterred by the listener so that the sentence reveals the past. Again through a detailed analysis of art he shows that what the viewer takes to be the experience of a painting is in fact the extraction of time from the shapes of the painting. Finally he highlights crucial aspects of the mind's attempt to recover time in examples of political subjugation.
This comprehensive and authoritative text/reference presents a unique, multidisciplinary perspective on Shape Perception in Human and Computer Vision. Rather than focusing purely on the state of the art, the book provides viewpoints from world-class researchers reflecting broadly on the issues that have shaped the field. Drawing upon many years of experience, each contributor discusses the trends followed and the progress made, in addition to identifying the major challenges that still lie ahead. Topics and features: examines each topic from a range of viewpoints, rather than promoting a specific paradigm; discusses topics on contours, shape hierarchies, shape grammars, shape priors, and 3D shape inference; reviews issues relating to surfaces, invariants, parts, multiple views, learning, simplicity, shape constancy and shape illusions; addresses concepts from the historically separate disciplines of computer vision and human vision using the same “language” and methods.
This book about Frank Lloyd Wright's building designs presents the process by which his final, well-integrated building plans emerged from a single, simple, geometric form.
Looking beyond the boundaries of various disciplines, the author demonstrates that symmetry is a fascinating phenomenon which provides endless stimulation and challenges. He explains that it is possible to readapt art to the sciences, and vice versa, by means of an evolutionary concept of symmetry. Many pictorial examples are included to enable the reader to fully understand the issues discussed. Based on the artistic evidence that the author has collected, he proposes that the new ars evolutoria can function as an example for the sciences.The book is divided into three distinct parts, each one focusing on a special issue. In Part I, the phenomenon of symmetry, including its discovery and meaning is reviewed. The author looks closely at how Vitruvius, Polyclitus, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and Durer viewed symmetry. This is followed by an explanation on how the concept of symmetry developed. The author further discusses symmetry as it appears in art and science, as well as in the modern age. Later, he expounds the view of symmetry as an evolutionary concept which can lead to a new unity of science. In Part II, he covers the points of contact between the form-developing process in nature and art. He deals with biological questions, in particular evolution.The collection of new and precise data on perception and knowledge with regard to the postulated reality of symmetry leads to further development of the evolutionary theory of symmetry in Part III. The author traces the enormous treasure of observations made in nature and culture back to a few underlying structural principles. He demonstrates symmetry as a far-reaching, leading, structuring, causal element of evolution, as the idea lying behind nature and culture. Numerous controllable reproducible double-mirror experiments on a new stereoscopic vision verify a symmetrization theory of perception.
Eye movement research from a range of disciplines is presented in this book. Contributions from all over the world examine theoretical and applied aspects of eye movements, including classical biocybernetic models, physiology, pathology, ocular exploration, reading, ergonomics/human factors, and microcomputer calibration techniques.
Current theories of visual change detection emphasize the importance of conscious attention to detect unexpected changes in the visual environment. However, an increasing body of studies shows that the human brain is capable of detecting even small visual changes, especially if such changes violate non-conscious probabilistic expectations based on repeating experiences. In other words, our brain automatically represents statistical regularities of our visual environmental. Since the discovery of the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential (ERP) component, the majority of research in the field has focused on auditory deviance detection. Such automatic change detection mechanisms operate in the visual modality too, as indicated by the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) brain potential to rare changes. VMMN is typically elicited by stimuli with infrequent (deviant) features embedded in a stream of frequent (standard) stimuli, outside the focus of attention. In this research topic we aim to present vMMN as a prediction error signal. Predictive coding theories account for phenomena such as mismatch negativity and repetition suppression, and place them in a broader context of a general theory of cortical responses. A wide range of vMMN studies has been presented in this Research Topic. Twelve articles address roughly four general sub-themes including attention, language, face processing, and psychiatric disorders. Additionally, four articles focused on particular subjects such as the oblique effect, object formation, and development and time-frequency analysis of vMMN. Furthermore, a review paper presented vMMN in a hierarchical predictive coding framework. Each paper in this Research Topic is a valuable contribution to the field of automatic visual change detection and deepens our understanding of the short term plasticity underlying predictive processes of visual perceptual learning.
