How line perception emerges from points

Human vision has a marvelous ability for grouping a set of points to form coherent line contour perception. The paper presents a model simulating this ability. Novel geometric binding effects and direct point-point and orientation interactions are introduced. Geometric binding effects arise from geometric redundancy reduction, and thus are global effects. Point-point interaction is short ranged and homogeneous. Orientation interaction is locally oriented and mediated by statistics of point-point connection nearby. Line perception is then generally formulated as combinatorial optimization. Since it includes local, global interactions and local context effects, the model may capture the partially grouping ability of human vision systems