Abstract

What makes things look the way they do? Humans are very good at making rapid determination of what things are made of, whether they are smooth or rough, and what color they are. In face, we are so good at this that we se things in terms of these interpretations rather than in terms of the actual optical appearance. As a result, we frequently overlook the actual physical appearance and are not aware of exactly how it reveals the properties of the surface. There is not even a good vocabulary for describing the physical appearance of surfaces, which makes it difficult to make progress in the measurement of appearance by instruments or the analysis of images by computer vision. Yet these processes are highly structured, and visual images are far from random signals.

© 1991 Optical Society of America