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...

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...

Vision as a user interface

The egg-rolling behavior of the graylag goose is an often quoted example of a fixed-action pattern. The bird will even attempt to roll a brick back to its nest! Despite excellent visual acuity it apparently "takes a brick for an egg." Evolution optimizes utility, not veridicality. Yet textbooks take it for a fact that human vision evolved so as...

The prior statistics of object colors

The prior statistics of object colors is of much interest because extensive statistical investigations of reflectance spectra reveal highly non-uniform structure in color space common to several very different databases. This common structure is due to the visual system rather than to the statistics of environmental structure. Analysis involves...

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...

Transparency and imaginary colors

Unlike the Metelli monochrome transparencies, when overlays and their backgrounds have chromatic content, the inferred surface colors may not always be physically realizable, and are in some sense “imaginary.” In these cases, the inferred chromatic transmittance or reflectance of the overlay lies outside the RGB spectral boundaries. Using the...