Abstract:

A fundamental, unsolved vision problem is to distinguish image intensity variations caused by surface normal variations from those caused by reflectance changes--ie, to tell shading from paint. A solution to this problem is necessary for machines to interpret images as people do and could have many applications. The labelling allows us to reconstruct bandpassed images containing only those parts of the input image caused by shading effects, and a separate image containing only those parts caused by reflectance changes. The resulting classifications compare well with human psychophysical performance on a test set of images, and show good results for test photographs.