A Counterexample to the Theory that Vision Recovers Three-Dimensional Scenes

Abstract

The problem of three-dimensional vision is generally formulated as the problem of recovering the three-dimensional scene that caused the image. Here we present a certain line-drawing and show 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.