Distinguishing shadows from surface boundaries using local achromatic cues
Authors: DiMattina Christopher , Burnham Josiah , Guner Betul , Yerxa Haley 
Published: March 2022

In order to accurately parse the visual scene into distinct surfaces, it is essential to determine whether a local luminance edge is caused by a boundary between two surfaces or a shadow cast across a single surface. Previous studies have demonstrated that local chromatic cues may help to distinguish edges caused by shadows from those caused by surface boundaries, but the information potentially available in local achromatic cues like contrast, texture, and penumbral blur remains poorly understood. In this study, we develop and analyze a large database of hand-labeled achromatic shadow edges to better understand what image properties distinguish them from occlusion edges. We find that both the highest contrast as well as the lowest contrast edges are more likely to be occlusions than shadows, extending previous observations based on a more limited image set. We also find that contrast cues alone can reliably distinguish the two edge categories with nearly 70% accuracy at 40×40 resolution. Logistic regression on a Gabor Filter bank (GFB) modeling a population of V1 simple cells separates the categories with nearly 80% accuracy, and furthermore exhibits tuning to penumbral blur. A Filter-Rectify Filter (FRF) style neural network extending the GFB model performed at better than 80% accuracy, and exhibited greater sensitivity to texture differences. Comparing the models with humans performing the same occlusion/shadow classification task using the same stimuli reveals better agreement on an image-by-image basis between human performance and the FRF model than the GFB model. Taken as a whole, the present results suggest that local achromatic cues like contrast, penumbral blur, and texture play an important role in distinguishing edges caused by shadows from those caused by surface boundaries.

AUTHOR SUMMARY

Distinguishing edges caused by changes in illumination from edges caused by surface boundaries is an essential computation for accurately parsing the visual scene. Previous psychophysical investigations examining the utility of various locally available cues to classify edges as shadows or surface boundaries have primarily focused on color, as surface boundaries often give rise to a change in color whereas shadows will not. However, even in grayscale images we can readily distinguish shadows from surface boundaries, suggesting an important role for achromatic cues in addition to color. We demonstrate using statistical analysis of natural shadow and occlusion edges that locally available achromatic cues can be exploited by machine classifiers to reliably distinguish these two edge categories. These classifiers exhibit sensitivity to blur and local texture differences, and exhibit reasonably good agreement with humans classifying edges as shadows or occlusion boundaries. As trichromatic vision is relatively rare in the animal kingdom, our work suggests how organisms lacking rich color vision can still exploit other cues to avoid mistaking illumination changes for surface changes.