Local Depth Edge Detection in Humans and Deep Neural Networks

Distinguishing edges caused by a change in depth from other types of edges is an important problem in early vision. We investigate the performance of humans and computer vision models on this task. We use spherical imagery with ground-truth LiDAR range data to build an objective ground-truth dataset for edge classification. We compare various computational models for classifying depth from non-depth edges in small images patches and achieve the best performance (86%) with a convolutional neural network. We investigate human performance on this task in a behavioral experiment and find that human performance is lower than the CNN. Although human and CNN depth responses are correlated, observers' responses are better predicted by other observers than by the CNN. The responses of CNNs and human observers also show a slightly different pattern of correlation with low-level edge cues, which suggests that CNNs and human observers may weight these features differently for classifying edges.