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Lightness, brightness and transparency: A quarter century of new ideas, captivating demonstrations and unrelenting controversy.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  20858514     Owner:  NLM     Status:  In-Data-Review    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
The past quarter century has witnessed considerable advances in our understanding of Lightness (perceived reflectance), Brightness (perceived luminance) and perceived Transparency (LBT). This review poses eight major conceptual questions that have engaged researchers during this period, and considers to what extent they have been answered. The questions concern 1. the relationship between lightness, brightness and perceived non-uniform illumination, 2. the brain site for lightness and brightness perception, 3 the effects of context on lightness and brightness, 4. the relationship between brightness and contrast for simple patch-background stimuli, 5. brightness "filling-in", 6. lightness anchoring, 7. the conditions for perceptual transparency, and 8. the perceptual representation of transparency. The discussion of progress on major conceptual questions inevitably requires an evaluation of which approaches to LBT are likely and which are unlikely to bear fruit in the long term, and which issues remain unresolved. It is concluded that the most promising developments in LBT are (a) models of brightness coding based on multi-scale filtering combined with contrast normalization, (b) the idea that the visual system decomposes the image into "layers" of reflectance, illumination and transparency, (c) that an understanding of image statistics is important to an understanding of lightness errors, (d) Whittle's logW metric for contrast-brightness, (e) the idea that "filling-in" is mediated by low spatial frequencies rather than neural spreading, and (f) that there exist multiple cues for identifying non-uniform illumination and transparency. Unresolved issues include how relative lightness values are anchored to produce absolute lightness values, and the perceptual representation of transparency. Bridging the gap between multi-scale filtering and layer decomposition approaches to LBT is a major task for future research.
Authors:
Frederick A A Kingdom
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Publication Detail:
Type:  Journal Article     Date:  2010-09-19
Journal Detail:
Title:  Vision research     Volume:  51     ISSN:  1878-5646     ISO Abbreviation:  Vision Res.     Publication Date:  2011 Apr 
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2011-04-12     Completed Date:  -     Revised Date:  -    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  0417402     Medline TA:  Vision Res     Country:  England    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  652-73     Citation Subset:  IM    
Copyright Information:
Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Affiliation:
McGill Vision Research, 687 Pine Av. W. Rm. H4-14, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1A1.
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