Stereopsis based on monocular gaps: metrical encoding of depth and slant without matching contours.

ABSTRACT

It is often the case in binocular vision that one eye can see between two objects lying at different distances but the other eye cannot. We have found that the visual system is able to correctly interpret images produced this way in which a single solid rectangle in one eye is fused with two half-sized rectangles in the other eye separated by a vertical gap comprising the background. Two rectangles in depth are seen. It is as if the solid rectangle is treated as two components which each match one of the physically separated rectangles in the contralateral eye. The sign of the depth depends on which eye's view has the gap and its magnitude increases with gap width. Measured depth is found to be equivalent to real stereoscopic depth with a relative disparity equal to the monocular gap. If overall disparity differences are eliminated, between the left and the right images, variations in perceived slant of the two rectangles are still seen with increasing gap size. That two surfaces can be seen in metric binocular depth despite complete camouflage of their separation in one eye's view, suggests that stereopsis be regarded as a broad process of surface recovery not necessarily requiring image disparity at the location of the depth step.