Representation Without Reconstruction

Abstract

According to the paradigmatic reconstructionist approach to vision, a visual system must first reconstruct the world internally, then extract from the resulting representation whatever features are necessary for the task at hand. Recent developments in computational vision and visual neuroscience show that many of the features needed for tasks ranging from spatial discrimination to object recognition can be extracted from the image directly, much as in Gibson's hypothesis of direct perception. In the emerging synthesis between Gibson's position and that of Marr, representation, and not necessarily reconstruction, plays a central role. This new synthesis seems to constitute a reasonable compromise between the extreme version of the purposive vision credo, which, paraphrasing Brooks, is vision without representation, and the reigning paradigm of reconstruction without purpose.