Interaction of depth probes and style of depiction

We study the effect of stylistic differences on the nature of pictorial spaces as they appear to an observer when looking into a picture. Four pictures chosen from diverse styles of depiction were studied by 2 different methods. Each method addresses pictorial depth but draws on a different bouquet of depth cues. We find that the depth...

Gauge fields in pictorial space

“Pictorial space” is the mental structure that appears to be the scaffold for the visual awareness when looking “into” (as opposed to “at”) a picture. Its structure differs from the “visual space” that is the scaffold for the visual awareness when looking into the scene in front of the observer. The structure of pictorial space has been probed...

Space-time disarray and visual awareness

Local space-time scrambling of optical data leads to violent jerks and dislocations. On masking these, visual awareness of the scene becomes cohesive, with dislocations discounted as amodally occluding foreground. Such cohesive space-time of awareness is technically illusory because ground truth is jumbled whereas awareness is coherent....

Blow-up: A free lunch?

We consider operations that change the size of images, either shrinks or blow-ups. Image processing offers numerous possibilities, put at everyone’s disposal with such computer programs as Adobe Photoshop. We consider a different class of operations, aimed at immediate visual awareness, rather than pixel arrays. We demonstrate cases of blow-ups...

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...

Space perception in pictures

A "picture" is a at object covered with pigments in a certain pattern. Human observers, when looking "into" a picture (photograph, painting, drawing, . . . say) often report to experience a three dimensional "pictorial space." This space is a mental entity, apparently triggered by so called pictorial cues. The latter are sub-structures of color...

Pictorial depth probed through relative sizes

In the physical environment familiar size is an effective depth cue because the distance from the eye to an object equals the ratio of its physical size to its angular extent in the visual field. Such simple geometrical relations do not apply to pictorial space, since the eye itself is not in pictorial space, and consequently the notion ...

Rank order scaling of pictorial depth

We address the topic of “pictorial depth” in cases of pictures that are unlike photographic renderings. The most basic measure of “depth” is no doubt that of depth order. We establish depth order through the pairwise depth-comparison method, involving all pairs from a set of 49 fiducial points. The pictorial space for this study was evoked by a...

Depth

Depth is the feeling of remoteness, or separateness, that accompanies awareness in human modalities like vision and audition. In specific cases depths can be graded on an ordinal scale, or even measured quantitatively on an interval scale. In the case of pictorial vision this is complicated by the fact that human observers often appear to apply...

Measuring 3D point configurations in pictorial space

We propose a novel method to probe the depth structure of the pictorial space evoked by paintings. The method involves an exocentric pointing paradigm that allows one to find the slope of the geodesic connection between any pair of points in pictorial space. Since the locations of the points in the picture plane are known, this immediately...

Pictorial relief for equiluminant images

Pictorial relief depends strongly on “cues” in the image. For isoluminant renderings some cues are missing, namely all information that is related to luminance contrast (e.g., shading, atmospheric perspective). It has been suggested that spatial discrimination and especially pictorial space suffer badly in isoluminant conditions. We have...