Presenter - Holly Rushmeier

Holly Rushmeier, Professor of Computer Science, Yale University
Afternoon Breakout Session

Appearance Attributes and Factors Impacting their Perception

Appearance is a multiplex visual phenomenon that is usually broken down to several appearance attributes for simplification of studying its nature. Color, texture, gloss, and translucency are considered major appearance attributes. While significant work has been done in metrology for accurate instrumental measurement of appearance, little is known how humans perceive appearance, what factors impact their perception, and how different attributes interact with each other. Although color perception mechanisms are relatively well understood, the same cannot be said about other attributes of appearance. In this work, we try to bring to light various aspects of appearance perception using psychophysical experiments. We have been conducting series of psychophysical experiments with various real and synthetic visual stimuli, in order to identify behavioral patterns in the visual appearance assessment process that should lead to a qualitative model of the visual appearance. Secondly, we identified interactions among the appearance attributes. Particularly interesting question is impact of translucency on gloss perception. Gloss is widely accepted as a surface-based property, both by definition and by means of metrology. However, mechanisms of gloss perception are yet to be fully understood. Potential cues generating gloss perception can be a product of phenomena other than surface. While human observers are less likely to be capable of inverting optics, they might also fail predicting the origin of the cues. Therefore, we hypothesize that translucency impacts perceived glossiness. This work is being performed in collaboration with Davit Gigilashvili at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who is leading the effort.

Bio

Holly Rushmeier is the John C. Malone professor of Computer Science at Yale University. She received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1977, 1986 and 1988 respectively. Between receiving the BS and returning to graduate school in 1983 she worked as an engineer at the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company and at Washington Natural Gas Company. After receiving the PhD she served on the Mechanical Engineering faculty at Georgia Tech, the computing and mathematics staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and was a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center before taking her current position at Yale. Prof. Rushmeier‘s research includes modeling the appearance of materials for graphics rendering and industrial design, sketching techniques for conceptual design, the application of perceptual principles to rendering, and cultural heritage computing. Dr. Rushmeier has served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, as co-Editor in chief Computer Graphics Forum, and as well as the chair of numerous conferences and workshop committees. She is an ACM fellow, a fellow of the Eurographics Association, and received the 2013 ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.