Abstract
Emergence refers to a phenomenon by which human perceives complete objects in a seemingly noisy image not by recognizing local parts of image but viewing the image as a whole. The Dalmatian dog image created by R. C. James is probably the best demonstration of emergence [Bach 2002]. It shows that local windows from the image reveal nothing but meaningless, complex and random black splats. Only when the image is viewed as a whole, a Dalmatian dog suddenly appears. The absence of meaningful information in local image parts largely hinders existing computer vision algorithms from recognizing emerging figures. Therefore, it makes the emergence an new type of CAPTCHA to tell human and machine apart.