Learning about Canonical Views from Internet Image Collections

Although human object recognition is supposedly robust to viewpoint, much research on human perception indicates that there is a preferred or "canonical" view of objects. This phenomenon was discovered more than 30 years ago but the canonical view of only a small number of categories has been validated experimentally. Moreover, the explanation for why humans prefer the canonical view over other views remains elusive. In this paper we ask: Can we use Internet image collections to learn more about canonical views? We start by manually finding the most common view in the results returned by Internet search engines when queried with the objects used in psychophysical experiments.