A Theory of Specular Surface Geometry
International Journal of Computer Vision
Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Acquiring the reflectance field of a human face
Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
What do reflections tell us about the shape of a mirror?
APGV '04 Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization
Visual attention in auditory display
PIT'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international tutorial and research conference on Perception and Interactive Technologies
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Many materials including water, plastic and metal have specular surface characteristics. Specular reflections have commonly been considered a nuisance for the recovery of object shape. However, the way that reflections are distorted across the surface depends crucially on 3D curvature, suggesting that they could in fact be a useful source of information. Indeed, observers can have a vivid impression of 3D shape when an object is perfectly mirrored (i.e. the image contains nothing but specular reflections). This leads to the question what are the underlying mechanisms of our visual system to extract this 3D shape information from a perfectly mirrored object. In this paper we propose a biologically motivated recurrent model for the extraction of visual features relevant for the perception of 3D shape information from images of mirrored objects. We analyze qualitatively and quantitatively the results of computational model simulations and show that bidirectional recurrent information processing leads to better results then pure feedforward processing. Furthermore we utilize the model output to create a rough non-photorealistic sketch representation of a mirrored object, which emphasizes image features that are mandatory for 3D shape perception (e.g. occluding contour, regions of high curvature). Moreover, this sketch illustrates that the model generates a representation of object features independent of the surrounding scene reflected in the mirrored object.