Natural scenes and the depth of statistical knowledge

David Field

Statistical dependencies in natural scenes occur at all levels: from pixel-pixel relationships to object-object relationships. All levels of these dependencies can be shown to important to recognition. Recent work in statistical learning has shown that human observers and infants can learn a wide range of different statistical information . However, the skills in picking up statistical regularities creates potential problems in identifying illusory vs. meaningful structure. In this talk, evidence of these illusions will be presented along with questions regarding the statistics used in identifying information in scenes.