Simplicity, regularity and perceptual interpretations: A structural information approach

Abstract

In the history of visual science, students of perception have searched for organizational grouping principles that determine how an arbitrary visual pattern is interpreted. The notion of simplicity advocated in this chapter attempts to combine various aspects of perceptual grouping within one framework and is a central issue within the Structural Information Theory (SIT), initiated by Leeuwenberg (1969, 1971) and further developed since then. In this chapter, a brief introduction to the notion of simplicity and SIT's regularity based quantifications is given. Furthermore, applications of SIT on various stimulus domains (series, surfaces, objects) are illustrated.