Volume 2, Number 8, Article 4, Pages 571-576 doi:10.1167/2.8.4 http://journalofvision.org/2/8/4/ ISSN 1534-7362
Is the world full of circles?
Carson C. Chow
Department of Mathematics and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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Dezhe Z. Jin
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
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Alessandro Treves
Cognitive Neuroscience, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Trieste, Italy
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Abstract

The statistical arrangement of oriented segments in natural scenes was recently proposed to be indicative of a cocircularity rule. In particular, the probability density function of the relative position of two oriented segments was found to be maximal along fixed angles on the plane, consistent with the two segments being tangent to two points of a circle. Does this observation point to a prevalence of circles in natural scenes? Here we demonstrate that similar statistics can be obtained even when circles are not very common in visual scenes. The reason is that circles or near circular objects can heavily skew the distribution in favor of the cocircularity rule.

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History
Received March 21, 2002; published December 2, 2002
Citation
Chow, C. C., Jin, D. Z., & Treves, A. (2002). Is the world full of circles? Journal of Vision, 2(8):4, 571-576, http://journalofvision.org/2/8/4/, doi:10.1167/2.8.4.
Keywords
natural scenes, cocircularity, orientation selectivity, gestalt, object perception, closed contours, vision
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