The Good Gestalt Concept in Machine Perception

The ability to detect individual objects in complex scenes is an important aspect of human perception. The good Gestalt condition is an attempt to ensure that machines have a similar ability. We define "object classes" in terms of the machine\´s discriminatory ability and require that the presence of an object in a scene is reflected in the machine\´s representation of that scene. We find that the good Gestalt condition places constraints on the perceptual tasks which can be performed by a machine with a given representation space. In particular, a machine with a finite dimensional vector representational space cannot consistently detect relationships between objects.