Visual Reconstruction

Visual Reconstruction presents a unified and highly original approach to the treatment of continuity in vision. It introduces, analyzes, and illustrates two new concepts. The first - the weak continuity constraint - is a concise, computational formalization of piecewise continuity. It is a mechanism for expressing the expectation that visual quantities such as intensity, surface color, and surface depth vary continuously almost everywhere, but with occasional abrupt changes. The second concept - the graduated nonconvexity algorithm - arises naturally from the first. It is an efficient, deterministic (nonrandom) algorithm for fitting piecewise continuous functions to visual data.