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This book demonstrates bene?ts of abstract and qualitative reasoning that have not received much attention in the context of autonomous robotics before. Bremen, Christian Freksa December 2007 Director of the SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition Preface This book addresses spatial representations and reasoning techniques for - bile robot mapping, providing an analysis of fundamental representations and processes involved. A spatial representation based on shape information is p- posed and shape analysis techniques are developed to tackle the correspondence problem in robot mapping. A general mathematical formulation is presented to provide the formal ground for an e?cient matching of con?gurations of objects. This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Bremen, Germany. Manycontributeto the developmentofa dissertation,butsomeofthemstand out. Christian Freksa, I thank you for supporting and encouraging my work, for introducing me to interdisciplinary work, for giving me the freedom to develop this dissertation, and for providing an enjoyable atmosphere to work in. Longin Jan Latecki, thank you for countless in-depth discussions helping me to develop andtopositionmywork,forthefruitfulcollaboration,andformakingaresearch stay possible that has been very valuable to me. I thank the research groups in Bremen and Philadelphia for helpful discussions and feedback, in particular Jan Oliver Wallgrun. ¨ I also thank Kai-Florian Richter, Sven Bertel, and Lutz Frommberger for feedback on this work. Robert Ross, thank you for helping to proof-read this dissertation.

The world is divided into objects: things that are distinct from their backgrounds and that can move or be moved. Objects are food and prey and threats, as well as neutral items, and it is critical to be able to see them. How the form of an object is distinguished is one of the most basic, yet least understood, topics of research in vision perception. The object-defining system needs to operate in the real world, where objects and viewers move, and where the scene is cluttered, rarely offering a clear, unobscured view of any object. How are we able to see and define objects using the complex pattern of light falling on the retina? An object becomes visible if it differs sufficiently from its surroundings in its luminance, color, texture, motion, or depth. Although the processes that use these different cues are quite distinct, research has shown that they share some organizational principles. This book, Seeing Spatial Form, is dedicated to David Martin Regan who has made so many contributions to our understanding of how we see objects. Its chapters bring together ideas from some of the world's leading researchers in form vision to explain what we know about distinguishing form. The book includes a CD-ROM, which contains additional demonstrations and color images that considerably enhance the chapter contents. Seeing Spatial Form will be an invaluable resource for student and professional researchers in vision science, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.

From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributes to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.

From Fragments to Objects

First published in 1987. This book is the fourth in a series of research monographs reporting the results of a continuing study that deals with the perception of form in two- and three-dimensional space.

Examining the current state of the research in perception stressing contributions in visual information processing, this volume provides an original and timely account of recent results obtained in this and other related areas of cognitive psychology. The scope of the book is intended to be broad, featuring state-of-the-art contributions from a number of outstanding researchers from different parts of the world -- the United States, Europe, and Australia. The intention is to update areas of considerable theoretical implications and active experimental investigation in this broad field called the'psychology of perception.'This volume's main purpose is to highlight, from a cognitive position, a selected number of important theoretical and empirical topics which deal with critical issues in perception and other high level, related cognitive processes such as attention, mental representation, memory, word naming and semantic categorization. The studies reported were designed to answer many far-reaching questions including: • Is the global precedence effect due to low or high level processing? • Can veridical and illusory perception be explained by the same theory? • What is the relationship between attention and perception? • Is perception'direct'or an inferential process? • What mechanisms are involved in picture and word naming and categorization? • How can word and picture processing be modeled? The answers to these questions seek to unite theoretical perspectives on very important areas of cognitive psychology such as attention, perception, representation of visual objects and words, and human memory.

Published in the year 1982, Visual Form Detection in Three-dimensional Space is a valuable contribution to the field of Cognitive Psychology.

'A Bradford book.'