“Are Impossible Figures Possible?”, 1983-05-01 (; similar):
In the paper, a thorough analysis of the so-called impossible figures phenomenon is attempted. The notion of an impossible figure and some other related phenomena (eg. ‘likely’ and ‘unlikely’ figures) are precisely defined and analyzed.
It is shown that all these figures, being illusions of spatial interpretation of pictures, are more relevant to psychology of vision (and related artificial intelligence research) than to geometry or mathematics in general. It suggests an inadequacy of several previous formal approaches to explain these phenomena and to deal with them in computer vision programs.
The analysis of these spatial interpretation illusions allows us to formulate several properties of the structure of our spatial interpretation mechanism. A 2-stage structure of this mechanism, a set of basic ‘interpretation assumptions’ and a set of basic ‘impossibility causes’ are identified as a result.
[Keywords: impossible figures, visual illusions, spatial (3-D) interpretation of pictures, computer vision]
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