15.06.2015

Our visitor Bei Xiao will give a talk @ NIP next Monday, 22nd of June from 14:30-15:15

Title: "Perceptual Dimensions of Object Material Properties"

Abstract:

Materials such as liquid, stone, fabrics or plastic, have distinctive physical properties. Physics-based rendering has developed sophisticated descriptions of material properties such as the bidirectional reflectance distribution function to describe surface reflectance. The parameter space of such physical models is very large but humans have a much more reduced representation of parameter space describing material appearances. Understanding perceptual representation is helpful in graphical simulation of novel materials, reducing computational cost, predicting contextual effects, and establishing computational models of material inference.

In this talk, I will discuss recent progress on perception of translucent materials (e.g. wax, jade, skin) and fabrics (e.g. jeans, silk, cotton): types of materials that are both prevalent and challenging to simulate. First, I will discuss how the scattering phase functions affect translucent appearance and how human establish a lower-dimensional perceptual embedding of the phase function space. In the second part, I will present recent results of human perception of mechanical properties of cloth (e.g. stiffness) in dynamic scenes and discuss methods of multidimensional scaling in understanding perceptual space of cloth simulations.