Achievement

DeCarlo, Singh and trainee Kevin Sanik are studying the effectiveness of line drawings in conveying accurate portrayals of 3D shape to human observers. Understanding how humans perceive line drawings containing critical and suggestive contour cues (such as ridges, valleys, apparent ridges) is important for the design of useful as well as aesthetically pleasing graphical interfaces. Sanik and DeCarlo used the psychophysical technique of adjusting guage figures over local regions of the test contours to estimate perceived shape. They found that while line drawings did not always perform as well as actual shapes, a combination of contour cues could lead to reliable percepts of 3 dimensionality and shape. Ref: Cole, F., Sanik, K., DeCarlo, D., Finkelstein, A., Funkhouser, T., Rusinkiewicz, S., Singh, M. (2009). How well do line drawings depict shape? SIGGRAPH 2009, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 28(3).