Dead leaves and the dirty ground: low-level image statistics in transmissive and occlusive imaging environments.
/ Authors
/ Abstract
The opacity of typical objects in the world results in occlusion, an important property of natural scenes that makes inference of the full three-dimensional structure of the world challenging. The relationship between occlusion and low-level image statistics has been hotly debated in the literature, and extensive simulations have been used to determine whether occlusion is responsible for the ubiquitously observed power-law power spectra of natural images. To deepen our understanding of this problem, we have analytically computed the two- and four-point functions of a generalized "dead leaves" model of natural images with parameterized object transparency. Surprisingly, transparency alters these functions only by a multiplicative constant, so long as object diameters follow a power-law distribution. For other object size distributions, transparency more substantially affects the low-level image statistics. We propose that the universality of power-law power spectra for both natural scenes and radiological medical images, formed by the transmission of x-rays through partially transparent tissue, stems from power-law object size distributions, independent of object opacity.
Journal: Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics