Journal article

Publication year: 2017

Journal: Journal of Vision

Volume number: 17

Issue number: 3

ISSN: 1534-7362

Open access status: Gold

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1167/17.3.14

Publisher: Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology

Abstract: 
The magnitudes of chromatic and achromatic edge contrast are statistically independent and thus provide independent information, which can be used for objectcontour perception. However, it is unclear if and how much object-contour perception benefits from chromatic edge contrast. To address this question, we investigated how well human-marked object contours can be predicted from achromatic and chromatic edge contrast. We used four data sets of human-marked object contours with a total of 824 images. We converted the images to the Derrington-Krauskopf-Lennie color space to separate chromatic from achromatic information in a physiologically meaningful way. Edges were detected in the three dimensions of the color space (one achromatic and two chromatic) and compared to human-marked object contours using receiver operating-characteristic (ROC) analysis for a threshold-independent evaluation. Performance was quantified by the difference of the area under the ROC curves (DAUC). Results were consistent across different data sets and edge-detection methods. If chromatic edges were used in addition to achromatic edges, predictions were better for 83% of the images, with a prediction advantage of 3.5% DAUC, averaged across all data sets and edge detectors. For some images the prediction advantage was considerably higher, up to 52% DAUC. Interestingly, if achromatic edges were used in addition to chromatic edges, the average prediction advantage was smaller (2.4% DAUC). We interpret our results such that chromatic information is important for object-contour perception.

Harvard Citation style: Hansen, T. and Gegenfurtner, K. (2017) Color contributes to object-contour perception in natural scenes, Journal of Vision, 17(3), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1167/17.3.14

APA Citation style: Hansen, T., & Gegenfurtner, K. (2017). Color contributes to object-contour perception in natural scenes. Journal of Vision. 17(3), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1167/17.3.14