A topological solution to object segmentation and tracking.

The world is composed of objects, the ground, and the sky. Visual perception of objects requires solving two fundamental challenges: 1) segmenting visual input into discrete units and 2) tracking identities of these units despite appearance changes due to object deformation, changing perspective, and dynamic occlusion. Current computer vision approaches to segmentation and tracking that approach human performance all require learning, raising the question, Can objects be segmented and tracked without learning? Here, we show that the mathematical structure of light rays reflected from environment surfaces yields a natural representation of persistent surfaces, and this surface representation provides a solution to both the segmentation and tracking problems. We describe how to generate this surface representation from continuous visual input and demonstrate that our approach can segment and invariantly track objects in cluttered synthetic video despite severe appearance changes, without requiring learning.