Further Evidence Against the Recovery Theory of Vision

Abstract

The problem of three-dimensional vision is generally formulated as the problem of recovering the three-dimensional scene that caused the image. We have previously presented a certain line-drawing and shown that it has the following property: the three-dimensional object we see when we look at this line-drawing does not have the line-drawing as its image. It would therefore be impossible for the seen object to be the cause of the image. Such an occurrence constitutes a counterexample to the theory that vision recovers the scene that caused the image. Here we show that such a counterexample is not an isolated case, but is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as a general matter, the three-dimensional scenes we see when we look at line-drawings do not have these drawings as their image. This represents further evidence against the recovery theory.