Geons are simple 3-dimensional forms such as spheres, cubes, cylinders, cones or wedges. One theory of object recognition, Recognition by components (RBC) (Biederman, 1987), proposes that visual input is matched against structural representations of objects in the brain. These structural representations consist of geons and their interrelations (e.g., an ice cream cone could be broken down into a sphere located above a cone). Geons can be used to represent a large number of possible objects with very few components; e.g., 24 geons can be recombined to create over 10 million different two-geon objects.

Properties of Geons

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There are 2 essential properties of geons:

1. Viewpoint-invariance: they can potentially be distinguished from one another from almost any perspective (one exception being that from an end-on view, a cylinder can look like a sphere)
2. Stability: recognition of geons is often robust to occlusion and degradation by visual noise

See also

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• A theory of object recognition in humans

References

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Biederman, I. (1987) Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. Psychol Rev. 1987 Apr;94(2):115-47.

vision | perception

geón