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Extracting and depicting the 3D shape of specular surfaces

Published: 26 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Thin ScreenHandbook of Research on Practices and Outcomes in Virtual Worlds and Environments10.4018/978-1-60960-762-3.ch006(97-115)Online publication date: 2012
  • (2007)Detecting Specular Surfaces on Natural Images2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition10.1109/CVPR.2007.383215(1-8)Online publication date: Jun-2007
  • (2006)Visual attention in auditory displayProceedings of the 2006 international tutorial and research conference on Perception and Interactive Technologies10.1007/11768029_7(65-72)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2006

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cover image ACM Conferences
APGV '05: Proceedings of the 2nd symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization
August 2005
187 pages
ISBN:1595931392
DOI:10.1145/1080402
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 August 2005

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  1. 3D shape perception
  2. model of cortical form processing
  3. non-photorealistic rendering

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Overall Acceptance Rate 19 of 33 submissions, 58%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2012)Thin ScreenHandbook of Research on Practices and Outcomes in Virtual Worlds and Environments10.4018/978-1-60960-762-3.ch006(97-115)Online publication date: 2012
  • (2007)Detecting Specular Surfaces on Natural Images2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition10.1109/CVPR.2007.383215(1-8)Online publication date: Jun-2007
  • (2006)Visual attention in auditory displayProceedings of the 2006 international tutorial and research conference on Perception and Interactive Technologies10.1007/11768029_7(65-72)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2006

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