Real-world illumination and the perception of surface reflectance properties.

By Roland W. Fleming, Ron O. Dror, Edward H. Adelson. Journal of Vision, 2003

489 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Under typical viewing conditions, we find it easy to distinguish between different materials, such as metal, plastic, and paper. Recognizing materials from their surface reflectance properties (such as lightness and gloss) is a nontrivial accomplishment because of confounding effects of illumination. However, if subjects have tacit knowledge of the statistics of illumination encountered in the real world, then it is possible to reject unlikely image interpretations, and thus to estimate surface reflectance even when the precise illumination is unknown. A surface reflectance matching task was used to measure the accuracy of human surface reflectance estimation. The results of the matching task demonstrate that subjects can match surface reflectance properties reliably and accurately in the absence of context, as long as the illumination is realistic. Matching performance declines when the illumination statistics are not representative of the real world. Together these findings suggest that subjects do use stored assumptions about the statistics of real-world illumination to estimate surface reflectance. Systematic manipulations of pixel and wavelet properties of illuminations reveal that the visual system's assumptions about illumination are of intermediate complexity (e.g., presence of edges and bright light sources), rather than of high complexity (e.g., presence of recognizable objects in the environment).

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9915582867ce80444038321ab08482068a427acb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Lavanya Sharan
2. Ruth Rosenholtz
3. Ce Liu
4. Wilson S. Geisler
5. Alan L. Yuille
6. Edward H. Adelson
7. Daniel J. Kersten
8. David C. Burr

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Wilson S. Geisler
2. Alan L. Yuille
3. Daniel J. Kersten
4. Lavanya Sharan
5. Ce Liu
6. Ruth Rosenholtz
7. Pascal Mamassian
8. Edward H. Adelson

In Social Psychology

1. Alan L. Yuille
2. Ce Liu
3. Wilson S. Geisler
4. Daniel J. Kersten

Citations in the corpus

• Visual perception and the statistical properties of natural scenes. (2008, background): “E. Adelson, R. Blake, R. Diehl, B. Olshausen, and E. Simoncelli provided useful comments and discussion.”
• Object perception as Bayesian inference. (2004, background): “Fleming et al. (2003) showed that human observers could match surface re(cid:13)ectance properties more reliably and accurately for more realistic patterns of illumination.”
• Recognizing Materials Using Perceptually Inspired Features (2013, methodology): “have argued that the nature of the illumination affects the ability to estimate surface gloss (Fleming et al. 2003).”