Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We describe a computational model of humans' ability to provide a detailed interpretation of a scene’s components. Humans can identify in an image meaningful components almost everywhere, and identifying these components is an essential part of the visual process, and of understanding the surrounding scene and its potential meaning to the viewer. Detailed interpretation is beyond the scope of current models of visual recognition. Our model suggests that this is a fundamental limitation, related to the fact that existing models rely on feed-forward but limited top-down processing. In our model, a first recognition stage leads to the initial activation of class candidates, which is incomplete and with limited accuracy. This stage then triggers the application of class-specific interpretation and validation processes, which recover richer and more accurate interpretation of the visible scene. We discuss implications of the model for visual interpretation by humans and by computer vision models