Abstract

A rich body of work in the cognitive sciences shows that humans are able to perceive topological properties at a basic level (short time presentation, apparent motion). Minsky and Papert proved that the perceptron cannot compute topological primitives like connectedness. This has been used as an argument against computational approaches to early vision (L. Chen, 1982, Science, 218, 699-700). A recent finding by Lettvin (personal communication, 1991) provides a further challenge to computer vision scientists. Lettvin found that the “bug detector” does not respond to 3 dark blobs, unless they are connected with 2 lines.

© 1993 Optical Society of America