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What do reflections tell us about the shape of a mirror?

Published: 07 August 2004 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Three-dimensional shape may be perceived from static images. Contours, shading, texture gradients, perspective and occlusion are well-studied cues to this percept. When looking at a picture of a specular object, such as a silver vase, one additional cue is potentially available: a deformed picture of the reflected environment is seen in the surface of the object and the amount and type of deformation depend on its shape. Can specular reflections be used as a visual cue for shape perception? Our experiments show that our subjects are very poor at judging the shape of mirror surfaces in absence of other visual cues. However, for a considerable subset of the stimuli, subjects are highly consistent in their (most often wrong) perception. This observation leads us to the hypothesis that our subjects rather than 'computing' a percept from each image based on geometrical considerations, may be associating a shape to each pattern in a stereotypical way, akin to pattern-matching. This behavior is reasonable since, as suggested by our ideal observer analysis, the information available from specular reflections is ambiguous when the surrounding world is (partially) unknown.

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    • (2019)Visual shape perception in the case of transparent objectsJournal of Vision10.1167/19.4.2419:4(24)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2019
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    APGV '04: Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization
    August 2004
    184 pages
    ISBN:1581139144
    DOI:10.1145/1012551
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 07 August 2004

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    Author Tags

    1. mirror surfaces
    2. shape from texture
    3. shape perception
    4. specular reflections

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    View all
    • (2023)3D shape recovery algorithm from image orientations of textured surfacesJournal of the Optical Society of America A10.1364/JOSAA.49143340:9(1673)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2023
    • (2019)Computational Model for Human 3D Shape Perception From a Single Specular ImageFrontiers in Computational Neuroscience10.3389/fncom.2019.0001013Online publication date: 1-Mar-2019
    • (2019)Visual shape perception in the case of transparent objectsJournal of Vision10.1167/19.4.2419:4(24)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2019
    • (2019)Mirror Surface Reconstruction Using Polarization Field2019 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP)10.1109/ICCPHOT.2019.8747335(1-9)Online publication date: May-2019
    • (2018)A Geometric Model for Specularity Prediction on Planar Surfaces with Multiple Light SourcesIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2017.267744524:5(1691-1704)Online publication date: 1-May-2018
    • (2016)Matching the Material of Transparent Objects: The Role of Background Distortionsi-Perception10.1177/20416695166696167:5(204166951666961)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2016
    • (2016)Flow-guided warping for image-based shape manipulationACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/2897824.292593735:4(1-12)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2016
    • (2016)An Empirical Model for Specularity Prediction with Application to Dynamic Retexturing2016 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR.2016.13(44-53)Online publication date: Sep-2016
    • (2015)Multi-view Reconstruction of Highly Specular Surfaces in Uncontrolled EnvironmentsProceedings of the 2015 International Conference on 3D Vision10.1109/3DV.2015.10(19-27)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2015
    • (2015)Effects of surface reflectance on local second order shape estimation in dynamic scenesVision Research10.1016/j.visres.2015.01.008115(218-230)Online publication date: Oct-2015
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