Surface appearance is one of the most important aspects of commercial products in fields ranging from the car industry and consumer electronics to cosmetics. Manufacturers strive to introduce special visual effects (finishing, coating) in order to visually communicate functional properties of products using a value-added, customized product design.
View and illumination dependent representation of real-world material surfaces is crucial for different applications in virtual prototyping, safety visual simulations or cultural heritage digitization. However, the measurement of the corresponding descriptive data is time consuming due to its massive size and dimensionality, which strongly limit any practical utilization.
Real-world comprises thousands of materials having different surface textures. The appearance of these textures is a key in our everyday judgements of material properties. These judgements are based on our past experience, recognition, and usage of these materials.
The main goal of this project is to identify relationships between human perception of real-world materials properties and corresponding computational features. We will use Bidirectional Texture Functions as state-of-the-art digital representation of illumination and view dependent real-world material appearance as an initial data for our analysis.