The perception of material qualities in real-world images
Name
606579568-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
19.96 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
48f62eff4e8ca496c5af4cd181d536c5
Author(s)
Sharan, Lavanya
Advisor(s)
Edward H. Adelson.
Date Issued
2009
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
One can easily tell if a sidewalk is slippery, if food is fresh, if a spoon is made of plastic or stainless steel, or if a suspicious looking mole warrants a trip to the doctor. This ability to visually identify and discriminate materials is known as material perception and little is known about it. We have measured human material judgments on a wide range of complex, real world materials. We have gathered several diverse image databases and made use of them to conduct psychophysical studies. We asked observers to classify surfaces and objects as being made of fabric, paper, plastic or other common material categories. In the first part of this thesis, we present experiments that establish that observers can make these judgments of material category reliably, quickly and in challenging conditions of rapid presentation. We find that categorization performance cannot be explained by simple, low-level cues like color or high spatial frequencies. In the second part of the thesis, we explore judgments beyond those of common material categories. Observers judged many dimensions of material appearance such as matte vs. glossy, opaque vs. translucent, rigid vs. nonrigid, soft vs. rough to touch, and even genuine vs. fake for familiar object categories like flowers, fruits and dessert. Observers were surprisingly accurate, even in 40 millisecond presentations. In the final part of this thesis, we compare the performance of state-of-art computer vision techniques with human performance on our images and tasks and find current techniques to be severely lacking.
(cont.) Taken together, our findings indicate that material perception is a distinct mechanism and can be as fast and flexible as object recognition or scene perception. When recognizing materials, low-level image information is of limited use for both humans and computer vision systems. We conclude that material recognition is a rich and challenging problem domain and there is much ground to be covered in both visual perception and computer vision.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-146).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
