Mixing material modes

We present a novel setup in which real objects made of different materials can be mixed optically. For the materials we chose mutually very different materials, which we assume to represent canonical modes. The appearance of 3D objects consisting of any material can be described as linear superposition of 3D objects of different canonical...

Shading, a view from inside

Shape from shading arose from artistic practice, and later experimental psychology, but its formal structure has only been established recently by computer vision. Some of its algorithms have led to useful applications. Psychology has reversely borrowed these formalisms in attempts to come to grips with shading as a depth cue. Results have been...

Box spaces in pictorial space: Linear perspective versus templates

In the past decades perceptual (or perceived) image quality has been one of the most important criteria for evaluating digitally processed image and video content. With the growing popularity of new media like stereoscopic displays there is a tendency to replace image quality with viewing experience as the ultimate criterion. Adopting such a...

Perceptual qualities of optically mixed materials (extended abstract)

We present a novel setup in which real objects made of two different materials can be mixed optically in a linearly weighted manner. We conducted a psychophysical experiment in which observers rated optical mixtures of the three combinations of glossy, matte, and velvety green birds. The observers rated the materials on four scales: matte-glossy...

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...

Illuminance Flow Estimation by Regression

We investigate the estimation of illuminance flow using Histograms of Oriented Gradient features (HOGs). In a regression setting, we found for both ridge regression and support vector machines, that the optimal solution shows close resemblance to the gradient based structure tensor (also known as the second moment matrix). Theoretical results...

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...

Structure of light fields in natural scenes

Light fields [J. Math. Phys. 18, 51 (1936) ;The Photic Field (MIT, 1981)] of natural scenes are highly complex and vary within a scene from point to point. However, in many applications complex lighting can be successfully replaced by its low-order approximation [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 18, 2448 (2001); Appl. Opt. 46, 7308 (2007)]. The purpose of...

Illuminance flow over anisotropic surfaces with arbitrary viewpoint

The theory of illuminance flow estimation by structure tensors is generalized for oblique viewing of anisotropic texture. An added benefit is that the theory predicts the behavior of unsupervised illuminant tilt estimators. The previous theory is refined with general matrix formulations and compacted by exploiting general properties of the...

Haptic perception disambiguates visual perception of 3D shape

We studied the influence of haptics on visual perception of three-dimensional shape. Observers were shown pictures of an oblate spheroid in two different orientations. A gauge-figure task was used to measure their perception of the global shape. In the first two sessions only vision was used. The results showed that observers made large errors...

Ecological optics of natural materials and light fields

The appearance of objects in scenes is determined by their shape, material properties and by the light field, and, in contradistinction, the appearance of those objects provides us with cues about the shape, material properties and light field. The latter so-called inverse problem is underdetermined and therefore suffers from interesting...

Haptics disambiguates vision in the perception of pictorial relief

In this study we demonstrate that touch decreases the ambiguity in a visual image. It has been previously found that visual perception of three-dimensional shape is subject to certain variations. These variations can be described by the affine transformation. While the visual system thus seems unable to capture the Euclidean structure of a shape...

Representing the light field in finite three-dimensional spaces from sparse discrete samples

We present a method for measurement and reconstruction of light fields in finite spaces. Using a custom-made device called a plenopter, we can measure spatially and directionally varying radiance distribution functions from a real-world scene up to their second-order spherical harmonics approximations. Interpolating between measurement points,...

Impact of Climatic Change on NW Mediterranean Deltas

Summary report of the MedDelt project. This project has studied the impact of climate change on the deltas in the northwestern Mediterranean sea.