What is object and perception?

In fact, the exact definition of an object and what constitutes perception are perhaps two of the biggest research problems today.

So, what is perception? According to dictionary, perception is "the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses." Even if we are only concerned with visual perception, it is still an intricate phenomenon. To simplify, we start by defining a minimal form of visual perception of an object as determining the boundary of the object. In fact, for many primitive interactions such as picking, pushing, reaching an object, even this minimal perception might suffice. More importantly, this minimal form of perception can be generated in a purely bottom up fashion without using any high-level semantics.

To complete our definition of object perception, we still have to define: what is an object? Once again, the concept of a general object is too broad and complicated. So we define the concept of a "simple" object instead: a compact region enclosed by the pixels at depth and/or contact boundaries in the scene; Also, the border ownership of these boundary pixels around a "simple" object must point to the interior of the object.

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