Plato's Cave: Abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is a form of generalization. For example in vision, a
surface brightness representation is like a one-to-one mapping of the
visual field. An edge image is an abstraction of the surface
brightness information. A contrast-insensitive edge image is an
abstraction of the contrast-sensitive edge image, and a corner image
which encodes only the points of intersection of edges, is a further
abstraction of the edge image.
Abstraction implies a many-to-one transformation between the many
possible variants of a feature to a single invariant form.
Abstraction, information compression, and invariance are all related
concepts, and are presumed to be manifest in higher levels of visual
processing.
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