Research in vision science has an intrinsic potential for integrating contributions from psychology, computer science, engineering, optics, neuroscience, and physiology, among many other areas of knowledge. During the past 15 years, many vision researchers have successfully demonstrated that the results of such interdisciplinary efforts can advance the state of the art and lead to promising discoveries.

This talk presents representative research results that blend experiments in human visual perception and computer vision models to solve challenging vision problems. Particularly, it discusses the issues of object and scene recognition and the role of context and shows how they are being addressed by the leading researchers in the field.

After introducing selected basic concepts of object detection and recognition, scene recognition and analysis, and the role of context, we will discuss representative attempts to model the process of context influences in object perception. We will then motivate further research efforts by presenting a number of fascinating open problems in this field and suggesting how they can be approached in a truly interdisciplinary way.

Dr. Oge Marques is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He is currently a guest professor with ITEC at University of Klagenfurt. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 2001, his Masters in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute (Eindhoven, NL) in 1989 and his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from UTFPR (Curitiba, Brazil), where he also taught for more than 10 years before moving to the USA.

His research interests include: image processing, analysis, annotation, search, and retrieval; human and computer vision; and video processing and analysis. He has more than 20 years of teaching and research experience in the fields of image processing and computer vision, in different countries (USA, Austria, Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, and India) and capacities. He is the (co-) author of 4 (four) books in these topics, including the forthcoming textbook “Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB” (Wiley, 2010). He has also