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Evaluating physical and rendered material appearance

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Abstract

Many representations and rendering techniques have been proposed for presenting material appearance in computer graphics. One outstanding problem is evaluating their accuracy. In this paper, we propose assessing accuracy by comparing human judgements of material attributes made when viewing a computer graphics rendering to those made when viewing a physical sample of the same material. We demonstrate this approach using 16 diverse physical material samples distributed to researchers at the MAM 2014 workshop. We performed two psychophysical experiments. In the first experiment, we examined how consistently subjects rate a set of twelve visual, tactile and subjective attributes of individual physical material specimens. In the second experiment, we asked subjects to assess the same attributes for identical materials rendered as BTFs under point-light and environment illuminations. By analyzing obtained data, we identified which material attributes and material types are judged consistently and to what extent the computer graphics representation conveyed the experience of viewing physical material appearance.

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Funding

This research has been supported by the Czech Science Foundation Grant 17-18407S and the US National Science Foundation Grant IIS-1218515.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information Theory and Automation, Prague, Czech Republic

    Jiří Filip, Martina Kolafová, Michal Havlíček, Radomír Vávra & Michal Haindl

  2. Yale University, New Haven, USA

    Holly Rushmeier

Authors
  1. Jiří Filip
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  2. Martina Kolafová
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  3. Michal Havlíček
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  4. Radomír Vávra
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  5. Michal Haindl
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  6. Holly Rushmeier
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Correspondence to Jiří Filip.

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Appendix: BIG data format description

Appendix: BIG data format description

The format stores image data by providing a list of image files to be included (so far PNG and EXR (half/float) image files are supported) together with optional meta data such as list of corresponding incoming and outgoing directions, color-space, spatial resolution, measured material name and descriptions. The stored binary data can be either loaded to the RAM or alternatively, for large datasets one can open a datafile and seek the requested data from a hard drive. The latter option is considerably slower but still acceptable for many off-line rendering scenarios. Once the file is loaded/opened one can use a standard “get-pixel” query function returning RGB triplet for specific spatial UV coordinate and image index. A transformation between image index and incoming/outgoing angles is up to the user and depends on an initial ordering of files during the saving process. Also we do not attempt to provide any compression of data as this could potentially impact visual quality and rendering speed. The compression can be easily added by extension of the format.

Since the proposed format is universal (it can include any LDR/HDR data), it allows an unified representation of any image-based information, e.g., movies, dynamic textures. The format also enables management of numerous scattered files that are difficult to handle without any metadata. The source codes for saving/loading of data to/from the format are made publicly available (http://btf.utia.cas.cz) to promote its wide usage and allowing easy adoption by various users for visualization and data analysis software packages. The format is composed of data chunks consisting of chunk ID, its size and data, as shown in a list of current data chunks and their brief description in Fig. 15.

Fig. 15
figure 15

A list of data chunks available in the BIG format

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Filip, J., Kolafová, M., Havlíček, M. et al. Evaluating physical and rendered material appearance. Vis Comput 34, 805–816 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-018-1545-3

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