Estimating the Illumination Direction From Three-Dimensional Texture of Brownian Surfaces

We studied whether human observers can estimate the illumination direction from 3D textures of random Brownian surfaces, containing undulations over a range of scales. The locally Lambertian surfaces were illuminated with a collimated beam from random directions. The surfaces had a uniform albedo and thus texture appeared only through shading...

Relative flattening between velvet and matte 3D shapes: Evidence for similar shape-from-shading computations

Among other cues, the visual system uses shading to infer the 3D shape of objects. The shading pattern depends on the illumination and reflectance properties (BRDF). In this study, we compared 3D shape perception between identical shapes with different BRDFs. The stimuli were photographed 3D printed random smooth shapes that were either painted...

Illusory gloss on Lambertian surfaces

It has recently been shown that an increase of the relief height of a glossy surface positively correlates with the perceived level of gloss (Y.-H. Ho, M. S. Landy, & L. T. Maloney, 2008). In the study presented here we investigated whether this relation could be explained by the finding that glossiness perception correlates with the skewness of...