Conveying three-dimensional shape with texture

Studies have shown that although shading can give an image a ”natural” look and is an important shape cue, visual perception of surface shape from shading only is severely limited when the surface is viewed locally without other visual cues such as occluding contours [Mamassian and Kersten 1996; Erens et al. 1993]. Research has shown that when the “right” texture is added to the surface, observers can reliably infer the 3D structure of the underlying shape. In our own previous work, we have found that the performance of subjects’ shape judgment is significantly better with principal direction oriented texture pattern than other directional texture following either a uniformly constant direction or varying non-geodesic paths unrelated to the surface geometry. In this paper, we report our findings of a new study further investigating the effect of anisotrpic textures on shape perception when the surface texture is represented in the form of a pattern of luminance variations ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: APGV
• Authors: Sunghee Kim, Haleh Hagh-Shenas, Victoria Interrante
• Keywords: APGV 2004, Important Shape Cue, Principal Directions, Surface Shape