Quantifying the role of context in visual object recognition

By Elan Barenholtz. 2010

25 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An object's context may serve as a source of information for recognition when the object's image is degraded. The current study aimed to quantify this source of information. Stimuli were photographs of objects divided into quantized blocks. Participants decreased block size (increasing resolution) until identification. Critical resolution was compared across three conditions: (1) when the picture of the target object was shown in isolation, (2) in the object's contextual setting where that context was unfamiliar to the participant, and (3) where that context was familiar to the participant. A second experiment assessed the role of object familiarity without context. Results showed a profound effect of context: Participants identified objects in familiar contexts with minimal resolution. Unfamiliar contexts required higher-resolution images, but much less so than those without context. Experiment 2 found a much smaller effect of familiarity without context, suggesting that recognition in familiar contexts is primarily based on object-location memory.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Citations in the corpus

Not Using the Car to See the Sidewalk — Quantifying and Controlling the Effects of Context in Classification and Segmentation (2018, background): “when dealing with difficult low resolution images [15, 1].”