An investigation of surface reconstruction from binocular disparity based on standard regularization theory: comparison between "membrane" and "thin-plate" potential energy models

Visible surfaces of three-dimensional objects are reconstructed from two-dimensional retinal images in the early stages of human visual processing. In the computational model of surface reconstruction based on the standard regularization theory, an energy function is minimized. Two types of model have been proposed, called "membrane" and "thin-plate" after their function formulas, in which the first or the second derivative of depth information is used. In this study, the threshold of surface reconstruction from binocular disparity was investigated using a sparse random dot stereogram, and the predictive accuracy of these models was evaluated. It was found that the thin-plate model reconstructed surfaces more accurately than the membrane model and showed good agreement with experimental results. The likelihood that these models imitate human processing of visual information is discussed in terms of the size of receptive fields in the visual pathways of the human cortex.