Abstract
A COMPELLING sense of three-dimensional shape may be conveyed by the photograph of an object. Cues such as contour, shading, perspective and occlusion, to name a few, contribute to this percept. Psychophysical experiments suggest that certain aspects of three-dimensional shape are computed rapidly and in parallel by the visual system1–7,15. Here we report that reflectance is also computed rapidly; moreover, it is the apparent reflectance, rather than brightness or perceptual three-dimensional shape, that is the primary basis for discrimination during the early stages of visual processing.
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Sun, J., Perona, P. Early computation of shape and reflectance in the visual system. Nature 379, 165–168 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/379165a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/379165a0
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