u/therealrealvlad21

The black (white) parts of the texture stand out more on a white (black) background. This effect, discovered by psychologist Bart Anderson, is related to the Munker-Benary-White effect, where solid gray regions of identical luminance appear either whitish and blackish. It's a vivid demonstration of the influence of boundary conditions (contrast polarity) on textural figure–ground layer segmentation. Are there any known computer vision algorithms that can segment textures into figure–ground layers in this fashion?

This is one folks may not ahve seen before. The two blobs in the top row and the two blobs in the bottom row are physically identical, except for the thin black or white boundary lines. We perceive the interior regions of the blobs as weirdly different, with one appearing whiter (or blacker in the bottom row) than the other at different times. The second picture shows the blobs without the thin boundary lines. The effect shows how slippery the concepts of black and white can be.

I found this photo that proves that The Dress can be seen both ways, depending on the lighting.

EDIT: If you have trouble seeing it one way other the other, just cover the part of the dress in shadow or bright illumination (depending on whether you see blue/black or gold/white).

The point is that what you perceive depends on your "frame of reference", meaning which parts of the dress you perceive as being in "plain view". The regions seen in plain view are taken by your visual system as being "diagnostic" of the colour of the underlying material. So there's a type of "principle of relativity" at work here.

The weird part is that different folks adopt different reference frames as their "default" and it can be really hard to switch frames. I myself have literally never perceived the whole dress as anything other than gold and white. But this picture clearly demonstrates how it is POSSIBLE to perceive it either way!

I can elaborate with many other examples, if folks are interesting. I've even got an entire book on the topic coming out next month, which I'm happy to link to if folks want to go down the rabbit hole. It's called The Appearance of Things: How the Principle of Relativity Shapes Our Visual World https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCVLM6T9