The lawful imprecision of human surface tilt estimation in natural scenes

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Abstract

Estimating local surface orientation (slant and tilt) is fundamental to recovering the three-dimensional structure of the environment. It is unknown how well humans perform this task in natural scenes. Here, with a database of natural stereo-images having groundtruth surface orientation at each pixel, we find dramatic differences in human tilt estimation with natural and artificial stimuli. Estimates are precise and unbiased with artificial stimuli and imprecise and strongly biased with natural stimuli. An image-computable Bayes optimal model grounded in natural scene statistics predicts human bias, precision, and trial-by-trial errors without fitting parameters to the human data. The similarities between human and model performance suggest that the complex human performance patterns with natural stimuli are lawful, and that human visual systems have internalized local image and scene statistics to optimally infer the three-dimensional structure of the environment. These results generalize our understanding of vision from the lab to the real world.

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Seha Kim

Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

For correspondence
sehakim@upenn.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0356-6168
Johannes Burge

Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

For correspondence
jburge@sas.upenn.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

National Institutes of Health (EY011747)

Johannes Burge

University of Pennsylvania (Startup Funds)

Johannes Burge

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Informed consent was obtained from participants before the experiment. The research protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pennsylvania (IRB approval protocol number: 824435) and is in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.