Visual organization for figure/ground separation

A common factor in all illusory contour figures is the perception of a surface occluding part of a background. In our previous work, we have shown we could diffuse a proper set of junction hypothesis (what is salient or background) to obtain a surface where their boundaries represented illusory contours. Amodal completions emerge at the overlapping surfaces. We address the problem of selecting the best image organization (set of hypothesis). We propose an optimization criteria based on a coherence measure between pairs of junctions (correlation between the diffusion of each pair). A statistical physics approach to select the best organization is applied. The experiments suggest that despite the large number of possible organizations our approach may take only a few steps (in organization space) to select the best one