Symmetry In Vision

Annotation Symmetry has a central role in the study of vision. The concept of symmetry has an ancient origin in considerations of visual appearance; in modern times, abstracted and formalized into Group Theory, it has found spectacular applications, far beyond the visible; but its importance for vision persists in many ways including: - As a non-accidental feature of an image that cues affordances, 3D structure or the semantic categories of object present. - As a redundant aspect of an image which many be exploited for simplicity and compactness of encoding. - As a salient feature that draws attention, and evokes distinctive brain responses. - As a constraint on priors on the distribution of structures to be found in the natural world. - As an aesthetic principle. - As a design principle for vision systems. The original idea for a Special Issue came from a symposium at the European Conference in Visual Perception, in 2015, on the topic of brain responses to visual symmetry, but we have now extended the scope. This Special Issue is devoted to provide a shared place for cutting edge studies on how and why symmetry is processed and exploited by biological and artificial visual systems.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Symmetry in Vision" that was published in Symmetry

Symmetry is a fundamental principle of broad concern from the physical sciences to art and design. Much of its significance derives from the perceptual appeal of symmetry to the human brain, as testified by its universal inclusion in those icons of decor--oriental rugs. Although there have been many books on physical symmetry, none have addressed the issue of human symmetry perception. This comprehensive collection provides a wide range of approaches to the study of how we see symmetries, from evolutionary through empirical to extended theoretical treatments. The book is an invaluable resource for those concerned with the methods and analytic approaches to this challenging topic. It soon becomes evident that symmetry perception is not a simple example of neural pattern processing, since the essence of symmetry is to transcend the patterns of which it is composed. Consequently, this volume contains many novel methods relevant to the analysis of the long-range processing of mid-level vision rather than early neural filtering. It provides both a historical background and an intellectual stimulant to future developments in this lapidary field of study.

This book presents an introduction to the foundations, interpretations, and data-analytic applications of symmetry studies with an emphasis on applications in optical sciences. Symmetry studies connect group theoretic and statistical methods for data summary and inference. Readers should have an understanding of calculus and linear algebra as well as introductory statistics. The book reviews finite group theory in the introductory chapters. Computational tools used in the text are available for download in the form of Mathmaticaâ notebooks or R scripts. This book: Demonstrates the usefulness of a unified view of algebra and symmetry studies to address data-analytic questions in optics and vision science Offers a brief review of finite group theory and elements of multivariate analysis Includes various examples from diverse areas of optical science

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."

This book presents an introduction to the foundations, interpretations, and data-analytic applications of symmetry studies with an emphasis on applications in optical sciences. Symmetry studies connect group theoretic and statistical methods for data summary and inference. Readers should have an understanding of calculus and linear algebra as well as introductory statistics. The book reviews finite group theory in the introductory chapters. Computational tools used in the text are available for download in the form of Mathmaticaâ notebooks or R scripts. This book: Demonstrates the usefulness of a unified view of algebra and symmetry studies to address data-analytic questions in optics and vision science Offers a brief review of finite group theory and elements of multivariate analysis Includes various examples from diverse areas of optical science

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.