Generating three-dimensional shapes by using texture synthesis

Abstract

This research note reviews experimental methods to elucidate the visual processing underlying material perception, and considers how to generate experimental stimuli of three-dimensional shapes for the experiments. For generation of a computer graphics image of a three-dimensional object, it has been widely known that its shape features can affect the material appearance of the object. However, it is not established how to systematically control the shape features to investigate the effect. Here we suggest to utilize texture synthesis algorithms. Specifically, we used a height map of a three-dimensional object as a source image, and synthesized a novel height map by using a texture synthesis algorithm. We tested three algorithms to generate the height maps; i) synthesis based on image statistics, ii) example-based synthesis, and iii) synthesis using a convolutional neural network. We discuss how effective the texture synthesis algorithms are to investigate the effect of the shape features on the material perception.