Where’s Waldo? and I Spy are two book series that provide hours of entertainment to children as they attempt to find the hidden objects and people. To adults, however, these books do not have enough action or excitement. Several years ago, I began watching a television show that interested me because it contained components similar to I Spy, yet with the excitement and drama of a reality TV show. It appears that the adult equivalent to Where’s Waldo? and I Spy is the show, Storage Wars, in which people view storage units from an outside viewpoint, then bid on the actual contents. The bidders must identify hidden objects that are blocked by other items in order to most accurately assess the value of the unit before waging a bid. It is important to understand the role of middle vision and how it allows the principle of Storage Wars to be physically possible for the human brain.
Middle vision is responsible for processing and perceiving an object as a unique and entire item. Understanding the broader concept of object recognition helps in clarifying the function of middle vision because middle vision is a fundamental aspect in perceiving an “unknown” item. Object recognition allows people to identify something that has personally never been seen before, recognize partially occluded items, and distinguish an object from any visual perspective, called viewpoint invariance. Using the tools of middle vision and basic feature extraction, object recognition becomes an automatic and rapid process.
Some of the main components of middle vision include detection of edges, contour, and grouping. When factored together, these characteristics exemplify Gestalt psychology- “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” For example, the image below is a unit from Storage Wars and contains various items that are not positioned in normal context. By utilizing the Gestalt grouping rules of similarity and parallelism, it is apparent that the five oblong pieces of wood protruding forward on the right side of the picture are all legs connected to a desk. Even though the sixth leg is cut off in the picture and this is an unconventional viewpoint of a desk, a person should still be able to identify it with the help of middle vision and personal experience. This is just one of the many instances that middle vision allows people to differentiate items from one another even if the whole object is not in view.
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After spending several minutes studying this picture, you will be surprised at the number of objects you are able to identify without previously seeing this image or any of the exact items. Although many of the show’s treasures are hidden deep within the vast pile of junk, there are occasions when a bidder’s middle vision manages to identify the “wow factor” from a six-by-six inch exposure of the object. However, that really makes you wonder whether the object was truly spotted or if that is just reality TV at its finest.