Monocular occlusions determine the perceived shape and depth of occluding surfaces

Recent experiments have established that monocular areas arising due to occlusion of one object by another contribute to stereoscopic depth perception. It has been suggested that the primary role of monocular occlusions is to define depth discontinuities and object boundaries in depth. Here we use a carefully designed stimulus to demonstrate empirically that monocular occlusions play an important role in localizing depth edges and defining the shape of the occluding surfaces in depth. We show that the depth perceived via occlusion in our stimuli is not due to the presence of binocular disparity at the boundary and discuss the quantitative nature of depth perception in our stimuli. Our data suggest that the visual system can use monocular information to estimate not only the sign of the depth of the occluding surface but also its magnitude. We also provide preliminary evidence that perceived depth of illusory occluders derived from monocular information can be biased by binocular features.