MAKOTO ITOH
Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan
LEON O. CHUA
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Received February 26, 2008
Revised April 20, 2008

Visual illusion is the fallacious perception of reality or some actually existing object. In this paper, we imitate the mechanism of Ehrenstein illusion, neon color spreading illusion, watercolor illusion, Kanizsa illusion, shifted edges illusion, and hybrid image illusion using the Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV). We also imitate these illusions using Cellular Neural Networks (CNNs). These imitations suggest that some illusions are processed by high-level brain functions. We next apply the morphological gradient operation to anomalous motion illusions. The processed images are classified into two kinds of images, which correspond to the central drift illusion and the peripheral drift illusion, respectively. It demonstrates that the contrast of the colors plays an important role in the anomalous motion illusion. We also imitate the anomalous motion illusions using both OpenCV and CNN. These imitations suggest that some visual illusions may be processed by the illusory movement of animations.

Visual illusion; OpenCV; CNN; programming function; template; equilibrium state; nonlinear operator; Hough transform; morphological gradient; thresholding; edge detection; watershed segmentation; optical flow; animation; Ehrenstein illusion; neon color spreading illusion; watercolor illusion; Kanizsa illusion; Fraser illusion; shifted edges illusion; hybrid image illusion; central drift illusion; peripheral drift illusion