Learning a 3-D Visual Light Field: Effects of Exploration on Lightness Constancy

The pattern of light across a scene is determined by the lighting, the material properties of objects in the scene, and the three- dimensional (3-D) scene structure. The problem of determining the material properties of an object is therefore a complex one. To do this correctly the relationship between 3-D scene structure and lighting must be understood by the viewer. In this paper we describe experiments which evaluate how exploration of the lightfield [1] within the scene aids the estimation of surface lightness (albedo). We find that the experience of viewing a block moving throughout the 3D scene - illustrating the variations in lightfield – results in lightness constancy, i.e. viewers are able to estimate surface albedo under varying illumination. Exploration of the lightfield facilitated albedo recovery as opposed to simple brightness matching. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down.