Surface segmentation based on the luminance and color statistics of natural scenes

The luminance and color of surfaces in natural scenes are relatively independent under certain linear trans-formations, with the luminance of a surface providing little information about the color of that surface, and vice versa. However, differences in luminance between two locations in a natural scene remain strongly as-sociated with differences in color. We used the statistics of the spatiochromatic structure of natural scenes as the priors for a Bayesian model that decides whether or not two points within an image fall on the same sur-face. This model provides a biologically plausible algorithm for surface segmentation that models observe