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Note. What follows is a manuscript version of the invited lecture I gave at the Jacques Cartier Institute Conference on Imaging (St- Etienne, December, 1995). This lecture was very well received, and my first idea was to write a separately publishable manuscript. As its length increased I decided that I would use it as a chapter in the book I am preparing, provisionally titled Colour Theory and Practice for Computer Graphics. At that point further refining of the manuscript became less important than shaping it in accord with material in other chapters of the book, and I am leaving that task until later.


Rendering with Limited Means

William Cowan

Department of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
WBCowan@cgl.UWaterloo.ca


DRAFT: Please do not quote without permission!

Rendering is the middle stage of what might be called the image generation pipeline. The initial stage of this process is usually called modelling, and consists of the production of an abstract description of the image. Most usually, modelling is done by an artist or designer using an image editor, often called a modeller. At least, this terminology is standard when the model is the description of a three-dimensional object. However, if the model is two-dimensional the image editor is more likely to be known as a paint or illustration program. Also, other inputs are clearly possible, an example being a computer vision system.

Rendering then uses the description produced by the modeller to produce an intermediate representation. For three-dimensional models the rendering process typically consists of lighting calculations, hidden surface removal, scan conversion, and so on. Note that while scan conversion implies a raster-defined format this is not necessary, and something like a display list is also possible. For two-dimensional models rendering can be inconsequential.

The final part of the image generation pipeline is image display. This is accomplished by taking the description produced by the rendering process and converting it to a set of instructions that can be used to produce the image on a device. This last step usually involves some sort of image calibration. For example, the result of a rendering calculation often provides the tristimulus values of light in the scene mapped onto a plane by a perspective transformation. To display this image on a real device it is necessary to use a device characterization (Stone et al., 1988; Bell, 1996) to determine exactly what device coordinates correspond to each tristimulus value in the image. Furthermore, in the general case where there is not a good match between the colours of the rendered image and the possible colour outputs of the device gamut-mapping (Stone et al., 1988) must be performed as part of this step.

The division between different stages of the image generation pipeline is not fixed, but depends on many factors. For example, the inclusion of a PostScript interpreter in a printer often moves the division between rendering and display. Furthermore, some parts of this process clearly cannot stand on their own. For example, a modeller with no capability for rendering or display would be extremely hard to use. All the same, it is clear that the general breakdown described above is widely accepted in the computer graphics community, not least because graphics researchers describe their research in those terms.

What concerns me in this paper is a pair of assumptions. First, that the output of the modeller should be renderable by a variety of different renderers. Second, that the output of a renderer should be displayable on a variety of different display surfaces. The first assumption is implicit in the design of most image creation systems, specifically in the assumption that a single image format can be used to drive many different renderings: wire- frame, radiosity, ray-tracing, and so on. The second is implicit in all attempts to perform image reproduction. The importance of these assumptions is that they are generally used to limit the capability of image creation tools, and to define who should be expected to do what among the human users and developers of these systems. For example, the rough distinctions suggested here suggest that the image creator, while using the modeller, need not know what rendering and displaying will be done.

The argument of this paper is that capabilities required by image creators necessarily make a breakdown between modelling, rendering and displaying impossible. This is accomplished by considering some generic problems that arise in image rendering, and showing that they can be surmounted only by incorporating parts of the nominally independent modelling and display processes into rendering.

These questions originally arose in the context of the following question: how should rendering be modified if the displayed output is known to be limited? On trying to give a precise definition to terms in this question I discovered `unlimited image' to be a self-contradiction. The rest followed as a result of examining the consequences of this notion for rendering. In discussing these issues I have intentionally kept my consideration to a relatively high level, not getting into the details of algorithms that solve some of the problems that arise, but describing their general properties, and leaving the details for other occasions.


I. What does `limited means' mean?

The short answer is that all rendering whatsoever is done using limited means. Unlimited means would allow exact physical replication of the original, as discussed in Section III, below. We may react to limitations of our presentation media in two ways. The first is conceptually technical: we would reproduce the original object exactly if we could, and the problem we face is that of creating an appropriate perceptual metric that will provide a well-defined answer to questions like which of two renderings is closer to the exact object. The second is conceptually artistic: rendering provides a `reading' of the original, which has the effect of inducing organization on the original. This `reading' has the effect of strengthening some features of the original, and weakening features irrelevant to the induced organization is actually desirable. Note that this response to limitations in the rendering medium links modelling - in which the composition/organization of the image is created - to post-rendering - in which final adjustment of the image to take into account the presentation medium takes place.

Responding in a technical way to limited means let us consider several specific examples. Two examples from colour reproduction are well-known. The obvious one occurs when it is necessary to provide a reproduction of an image on a device that has a colour gamut that is either too big or too small compared to the colour specification present in the original. A variety of techniques exist for compressing and expanding colour gamuts, some interactive (e.g. Stone et al., 1988; Lamming and Rhodes, 1988), some algorithmic (Tumblin and Rushmeier, 1993). While none is perfect, and further research is clearly worth doing, the problem is well-posed at the level that such research tries to answer it. A second technical problem exists when the colour gamut of the presentation device, which consists, after all, of a finite number of colours, has so few available colours that colours present in the image can be presented only by colours that are perceptually different from them. Again, many algorithms exist for making the optimal set of colour choices when loading the colour look-up table on devices with limited bandwidth at each pixel (colour sets, ????). Alternately, and this is an important theme in managing with limited means, half-toning or dithering techniques (half-toning, ????; dithering, ????) exist, which decrease spatial resolution in order to increase chromatic resolution. Note the possibility of degrading inessential features of the image in order to provide more information about features that are considered to be more important, although it is not at all obvious how importance , or lack thereof, is assessed.

Many other examples exist, and are seen by interpreting conventional imaging operations in terms of the necessity of compromising image attributes because of limitations of the presentation medium. Clipping algorithms, for example, consistently remove graphical information that would be present on a larger image. Perspective transformations cope with imaging a three-dimensional original onto a two-dimensional display surface. Motion blur provides cues that motion is present in static images. Clearly, once elementary imaging operations are re-interpreted in this way it is inconceivable that any display medium would be considered as free of limitations.


II. Rendering criteria

Any discussion of `limited means' implicitly requires a rendering criteria, which describes quantitatively or qualitatively how closely the rendered image follows the original. Here are some examples of criteria that have been used at one time or another in computer rendering.

1. Physical identity

How close does the physical reality of the rendering approach the physical reality of the rendered object? Such a question is sensible to ask only when the medium in which the rendering occurs is identical to the medium in which the original exists. For example, if rendering the same image on two CRTs of the same type we would ask if the two images were physically identical or not, presumably by counting photons of different wavelengths emitted by the CRTs. Differences would indicate the necessity of calibrating one or both CRTs.

It is, of course, not necessary for the original to have a physical reality. In a CAD/CAM system the data structures describing a part contain a physical description. The manufacturing stage of the operation is designed to realize that physical description in a real object. It is, perhaps, unusual to use €rendering' to describe the manufacturing operation. It is more usual to use rendering to describe the operation in which the part designer receives a two-dimensional graphical display of the part as feedback during design. Such a rendering cannot be judged using a criterion of physical identity.

Note that it is quite possible that all aspects of the physical reality of a rendering may not be relevant. The geometry, the material from which a part is made are likely to be important, but not its temperature. Thus, physical criteria must specify which aspects of the original are relevant. As we will see below, this can create a grey area between physical and sensational criteria.

2. Identity of sensation

Because the creation of exact physical identity is often not possible image quality criteria often fall back on a more relaxed standard: identity of sensation. This means that the rendering creates precisely the same sensory inputs that the rendered object would. Again, a precise example is available from colour. Physically, the light emitted from a surface is specified by its spectral power distribution, among other things. Yet the perception of colour in the human visual system is three- dimensional, indicating that, in some way the human visual system separates spectral power distributions into equivalence classes, and that any two spectral power distributions lying in the same equivalence class are perceived to be `the same colour'. Under certain viewing conditions the structure of the equivalence classes is specified by Grassmann's three laws (Wyszecki and Stiles, 1982), which are believed to be determined by retinal photoreceptors. On this basis it is possible to create an image that provides stimulation of an arbitrary member of the right equivalence class, something that allows an huge saving in display bandwidth. For example, CRTs use three phosphors to produce light output that creates the correct cone stimulation for a given image. By contrast, creation of the correct physical signal is unimaginable in principle. (In practice the work on linear reflectance spaces and linear lighting models suggests that it may be possible within limits based on sensation responses of the human visual system, a more complex possibility, not yet realized.)

Another example can be found in image geometry. At any instant the spatial arrangement of light on the photoreceptors is described by the geometrical optics of the cornea, lens and retina. Inverting these optical transformations makes it possible to determine the geometrical arrangement of light in the image plane that is needed to create the same photoreceptor stimulation that the imaged object does. The result, not surprisingly, is very close to the classical theory of perspective, which is also the basis of camera design. This, presumably, is the basis of the term `photorealism', which is used to describe images created using a single static viewpoint. (Note that this usage of photorealism allows animation, which is conceptualized as being equivalent to a series of images, each associated with a specific static viewpoint, not all viewpoints necessarily the same, however.)

The basic idea that lies behind sensation identity is the following: if all input signals to a system are the same then all internal signals within the system will also be the same. While this idea is obviously correct it is not easy to put into practice. In computer graphics it is usual to separate the spatial (geometric), temporal and chromatic (colour) degrees of freedom, assuming that it is sensible to talk about the colour at a particular location and time as being uniquely defined by whatever sensations can be attributed to receptors that monitor that location at the specific time. The independence this creates between different aspects of the image makes computation possible. As we will see below, this independence is problematic.

3. Perceptual/cognitive identity.

Sensation identity treats perception as a filtering process: a large amount of information exists in the physical world, some fraction of which enters the human nervous system. Perceptual processes then act on this limited amount of information to reconstruct the physical object that gave rise to the information. This view is very sympathetic to the aims of photorealistic imagery. The image supplies information that, at the level of the senses, is as close as possible to the information that would be supplied by the imaged object. If it is close enough the perceiver is able to reconstruct the correct object, and perceives the image correctly.

It is, of course, possible to operate at a higher level, asking that the image should create the correct perception, whether or not the correct sensations are provided. This clearly involves both perceptual and cognitive processes. This is obviously much more complex than sensation identity. When an image is designed to create sensation identity it can rely on aspects of the nervous system that vary little from person to person. For example, photopigment responsitivities vary little, person to person. So do optical imaging properties of eyes. Furthermore, external modifications of the imaging system (eyeglasses) and internal changes in neural wiring operate specifically to bring ocular imaging close to a common standard. These considerations are the foundation of the clean standards that exist for describing sensation identity. These standards, not surprisingly, are popular in computer graphics and other technical disciplines that deal with human perception. Once they are accepted managing sensation identity is a problem that is susceptible to purely technical solution.

Unfortunately, there are many examples in the perception literature showing us very clearly that sensation identity does not necessarily imply perceptual identity in the way that physical identity implies sensation identity. The status of these examples is an important issue for current models of computer graphics, which are strongly based on sensation identity. They may be a small number of isolated, exceptional cases; if so, they are best treated as exceptional cases within a rendering model based on sensation identity. On the other hand, they may be the rule, and not the exceptions. If so, it is necessary to find both new standards for evaluating images and new methods for generating them.

This paper argues that non-identity of perceptual and sensation identity is common. How should computer graphics come to grips with this problem? We will argue that an important part of the solution is to be found by observing the practice of human renderers (artists and designers) determining the extent to which their customary practice follows the rules of physical and sensation identity, and understanding the artistic and design problems that cause them to deviate from these simple technical standards. In doing so we will start by examining the problems that make the production of physical identity hard or impossible, because they show the forces that drive imaging toward sensation identity, which has, to be sure, the weakness of producing images that are applicable only to the sensory systems for which they are designed. We follow that by examining sensation identity, looking particularly at three well-known places where sensation identity breaks down. These are problems well known to researchers in perception, and we will try to evaluate how pervasive a problem they are likely to be for computer graphics and discuss current attempts to modify conventional rendering systems so as to offer facilities for handling them effectively. Only at that point do we turn to more systemic issues, such as are raised by the practice of artists. These problems raise major issues for the fundamental architecture of rendering and modelling systems. We provide some algorithmic solutions to these problems, but without giving extensive details, which can be found in other papers.


III. Three things we know about physics

A physical view of rendering takes the following rather simple form. The perception of an image is the result of a physical stimulus consisting of photons impinging on the sensory systems of an observer. Let us create that physical stimulus, specified by photon wavelength and geometry, exactly as it exists in the real world in the presence of the modelled objects. The usual approximation for computer graphics restricts itself to recreating the light falling on a corneal surface that is fixed in position and direction. This limitation is not, however, necessary, at least in principle. A more Gibsonian approach to image synthesis, one in the spirit of virtual reality, might attempt to create the entire light field, allowing the observer to move within it (Gibson, 1966).

Why is this difficult? First there is a problem of scale. The wavelength, position and direction of photons, to the extent that these concepts are well-defined, are determined by quantum mechanical interactions between light emitted by whatever sources of illumination exist in the model and the exact electronic configurations of the atoms and molecules that comprise the objects of the model. Obviously this is prohibitive. To begin with, just providing a full description of the 10^30 elementary particles in a typical model is effectively impossible. Even worse, each one of these particles is integrating the Schrodinger equation in parallel with all other particles, in real time, to infinite precision, and in a field to which every other particle contributes. The optical field created by the model is the result of all this activity.

Nothing in this problem is new! Approximations are required, and optical physics provides us with rich and effective models for a wide variety of physical and optical phenomena. A great deal of the incontestable success of computer graphics over the past twenty years owes itself to the effective exploitation of models originally created in the physics community for the express purpose of providing a bridge between microscopic models of physical processes and the optical measurements to which they give rise.

Lest this description appear to trivialize research in rendering let us note that models adopted from optical physics must be extensively adapted before they can be used for rendering. Why? It is a truism of physics that except in a small number of special cases the size and complexity of a model vastly exceeds that of the system modelled. Research in physics, quite rightly, attends most closely to the special cases, which are chosen according to several criteria. First, they eliminate to the greatest extent possible every physical effect that is not completely understood. Second, they come as close as possible to one or another easy to model (and easy to calculate) limiting case. The isolated hydrogen atom, a staple of elementary quantum mechanics textbooks, is a typical example; a polyhedral container filled with a dilute ideal gas is another. Such cases are chosen because they are easy to model; experimentally, it is necessary to create artificial cases that closely approximate these conditions in order to provide meaningful comparison between experimental measurements and model calculations.

Unfortunately, such cases do not create very interesting images! Thus, computer graphics research generally pushes such models well outside the conditions in which they are easy to calculate, and explicitly by harnessing them to models of undeniable complexity. In fact, the limits of rendering technology tend to be defined by the ratio of rendering effort to complexity of the model rendered. Thus, the discoveries that are most important in computer graphics tend to be closer to the discoveries of engineering than to those of physics. What does this mean? The physicist can assure the engineer, on the basis of experiments with simple flow geometry, that a certain fluid is described by the Navier-Stokes equation, for example, with certain parameters. The engineer, in using this assurance, wants to use the Navier-Stokes equation to determine properties of fluid flow in complex geometries. To do so it is necessary to find effective approximations that enable him to draw appropriate conclusions on the basis of realizable computations. A computer graphics computation designed to image an unusually- shaped part made of aluminum, using optical properties of the aluminum surface provided by a physical model, must usually find a very similar realizable computation, something that is only rarely straightforward.

In finding a suitable computation - that is, one which approximates the underlying optical physics for all features that are visible, or at least important, in the image - we take a variety of things into account. For example, it is possible to neglect phenomena on length scales substantially smaller than the resolution of the output medium, or on length scales substantially greater than the size of the output medium. As a second example, it is appropriate to choose an approximate computation that gets right features of the image that are important to the image creator, as opposed to features that are unimportant to the image creator. As a third and more complex example, consider motion. If the display medium has no temporal dependence, but motion is to be displayed, it is essential to choose an approximation that renders the motion into a form that is consistent with the visual language being used by the image creator. Motion blur might be appropriate in one case; multiple images in another.

The first of these examples shows us that choosing a suitable approximation - that is, choosing a rendering equation - requires us to know details of the display medium. The second shows that the choice also depends on the intentions of the image creator. The third shows that the choice depends on interactions between the intentions of the image creator and the display medium. These constraints are recognized to be important, but are currently handled implicitly. `For the type of image you want to create this rendering system is better than the other one.' `You need system A if you want to get good quality printed output for this printer.' `You need to fiddle your model like this if you want to get a strong feeling of motion in the printed result.'

Fair enough. But while these arguments show that the interactions exist in principle they are not convincing to the effect that current ad hoc methods of handling these problems are unsatisfactory. The next two sections of this paper consider several specific problems that occur when perceptual and design issues are addressed, and describe solutions to those issues, emphasizing how the solutions cut across modelling/rendering/display boundaries not just in practice but in principle.


IV. Three things we know about vision

This section describes three salient facts about human vision, facts that influence capabilities and freedoms that are available during the image creation process. Are they attributes of sensation or perception, in the senses described in Section II of this paper? This question does not have a clean answer. First, the boundary between sensation and perception is not as sharp as might first be thought. Here are two examples of this problem. We might define sensation psychologically as purely filtered physical input, independent of active processing; but the very light shining on the phototreceptors is changed by the position of eye muscles, body posture, and so on. We might define sensation physiologically as low level signals uninfluenced by neural activity; but we find that rods and cones receive input from horizontal cells. Second, even with the intuitive sensation/perception dichotomy used above some of these facts are more `sensational'; some are more perceptual.

1. Perception is primarily local

A variety of phenomena demonstrate that human vision is more sensitive to local variations in an image than it is to global ones. This can be demonstrated in a variety of ways. One very psychophysical approach is simply to notice that the spatial modulation transfer function peaks away from zero, indicating that there is an optimal length scale for the perception of changing colour in an image. This means that if we are allowing colour assignment artifacts of a size that is inversely proportional to their perceptibility we would be willing to allow artifacts that produce gradual changes in colour, in preference to ones that produce changes in colour that are more localized. (Note that the peak in the modulation transfer function means that there are changes that are too localized to be easily perceptible. We are not concerned with such changes here.)

Curiously, insensitivity to large scale changes makes it beneficial to compute globally when creating an image, which is contrary to the usual practice of computing each pixel without considering the colour assignments that have been, or will be, made to other pixels. Why? If it is possible, by increasing the error at very long length scales, to decrease the error that exists at shorter length scales, the fidelity of the image improves. Such a trade-off is possible only by examining the image at long length scales - that is, globally. So the relative insensitivity of the human visual system to global artifacts makes global computation beneficial. We will see below several other reasons why global computation is important, and from them develop algorithms that can be used to render otherwise unrenderable images.

Thinking about visual phenomena, in contrast to the psychophysical reasoning above, it is possible to see several other arguments in favour of global computation. Consider, for example, the perception of brown. When does it occur? Brown is perceived whenever a colour is simultaneously yellow/orange/red in hue and dark. Dark, however, is a relative perception. It does not make sense to say that a specific colour is dark, only that a colour is dark relative to another colour. Thus, the same light falling on the retina may appear dark in one circumstance - when most other areas of retina have more light falling on them - and light in another circumstance - when most other areas of the retina have less light falling on them. In other words, the same stimulus may appear yellow in one case, when surrounded by black, and brown in another, when surrounded by white. If the goal of rendering is to produce something brown it is necessary to compute its colour value taking into account the colour value of surrounding areas.

Normally, such computations are automatically performed correctly as the result of brown objects being given low reflectance when they are modelled. What is interesting, however, is the possibility of having the same light - or tristimulus values - perceived one way in one part of an image and another way in another part of the image. Of course, the converse is also true: different tristimulus values can lead to the same perception in different parts of an image. Taking advantage of this opportunity requires exactly the same sort of global computation mentioned above.

Consider the problem of representing a sunset. The sun and sky are very bright, while near objects are in deep shadow. The dynamic range of such an image can easily be as high as 100,000. This far exceeds the dynamic range of paint (about 20), printing (about 10), photographic transparencies (about 200), CRTs (about 100), and of every other display device of which I know. Any normal rendering computation will produce a result only part of which can be displayed. That is, the display component must choose among a variety of unsatisfactory solutions. Centre the dynamic range of the output device on the sun and sky, leaving everything else black. Or centre the dynamic range on the shadows, leaving everything else featureless white. Or condense the dynamic range making the scene appear as it would viewed through fog. Or ... The non-existence of a satisfactory solution seems somewhat peculiar because, after all, human photoreceptors have a dynamic range not much greater than 100. Thus, it turns out that our ability so `see' a sunset at all depends on adaptation. When we look into the shadow our eyes adapt to low light levels and we can see a tonal range appropriate to the objects in shadow; when we look into the sky our eyes adapt to high light levels and we see a tonal range appropriate to strongly illuminated objects. Adaptation is not instantaneous, and we have all had the experience of waiting a few seconds after moving our gaze from light to dark, or dark to light until the appropriate adaptive state is present, thereby allowing effective vision. Similarly, it is impossible to see small objects superimposed on the sky other than as silhouettes because out visual system automatically adapts to the light level that covers most of the field of view.

Mechanisms that do not have a model of human adaptation, such as photography or physically-based rendering, have no straightforward method of capturing these visual changes, although we will mention a few ad hoc approaches to this problem in the next few paragraphs. On the other hand, a human renderer, a painter, for example, does the right thing more or less automatically. It works like this. He or she looks at part of the scene to be rendered, having the state of adaptation that any observer would have when looking at that part of the scene. In order to paint, attention is then transferred to the painting, and the state of adaptation changes to one appropriate to a visual system viewing the painting. The remembered appearance is then transferred to the painting. The result is to place on the painting an appearance similar to that which would be seen by an observer viewing the scene, but with the state of adaptation of the observer when viewing the painting. It seems that this effect then demands a model of visual adaptation. Indeed, an suitably detailed model of adaptation, applied both to the model to be rendered and to the displayed image, might do the trick. Unfortunately, visual science cannot present us with a suitable model, and it is even unclear that human vision is sufficiently standardized for such a model to be possible. (The effectiveness of artists such as Claude de Lorraine, Turner, or Magritte might argue that such a model does indeed exist, or possibly not, depending on how you judge their success.)

What is the effect of following the artist's practice? Locally, the contrast is veridical; but over longer distances there will be tonal changes. Specifically, leaves and branches of a tree seen against the background of the sky are as black as possible. But the same photometric levels, seen in shadow, are painted much lighter, taking into account the difference in adaptation when visual attention is directed to dark parts of the scene. These different parts of the picture are joined as seamlessly as possible. Interestingly, the necessity of presenting some level of detail at so many levels of brightness, and of joining those levels together, is very complex, and detailed viewing of paintings by the artists mentioned in the preceding paragraph reveals many inconsistencies in lighting. Some of these inconsistencies, to be sure, are just mistakes, but many are genuinely necessary in order to solve problems of presentation.

Fang (1993) described a different method for image representation. Using this technique an image is described as a collection of two- dimensional polygons. The rendering process uses any lighting model to produce a colour specification for each polygon, most likely by computing a colour specification for each vertex, and assuming that shading of some kind will be employed. Now, it is possible that some of these colour specifications lie outside the gamut of the display device. How does this representation allow this problem to be handled in a controlled manner? Associated with an image is a description of its two-dimensional geometry - the polygons - and a hierarchy of constraints. At the highest level of the hierarchy is a constraint that forces each pixel to have a colour specification lying within the gamut of the display device. At the second level of the hierarchy is a constraint that holds constant the contrast at the edges of each pair of adjoining polygons. At the third level of the hierarchy is a constraint that tries to maintain polygons close to the computed colour. The effect of the highest level constraint is to ensure that every colour is displayable. The effect of the other two constraints is to ensure that contrast, a local property, takes precedence over absolute colour, a global property. The result is an image quite similar to the images created by painters when they render high contrast scenes. The medium appears to have available higher contrast than is actually present.

Fang's algorithm fits fairly well into the computational pipeline discussed in section I, but with part of what is usually considered to be rendering - scan conversion - put into the display stage. It is this change in the boundary between rendering and displaying that presents the necessity of the unusual image representation. Note, however, that in putting scan conversion into the display stage - which means, in effect, that it is more likely to be handled by the display hardware than by the modelling/rendering software - we are recapitulating the effect of PostScript on printing software. PostScript provides an image representation that is resolution-independent, so that the same PostScript file can be displayed on devices that vary in resolution. Of course, scan conversion must be delayed until the device resolution is known, which makes it natural to scan convert in the display phase of imaging. In the same way Fang postpones the actual assignment of colour values until the colour gamut of the display device is known. However, in order to take advantage of the effects discussed in this section it is advantageous to maintain the image in a representation in which scan conversion has not yet taken place.

It is natural to ask if something similar can be done with images that are more conventional in representation, methods that allow scan conversion to take place before the colour gamut of the display device is known. In fact, two methods exist. Neither is new; both can be implemented efficiently compared to the constraint solution required by Fang. The first has long been known in printing as `unsharp masking' (Yule, 1967). It involves subtracting from the image a blurred version of itself. This technique reduces contrast on all length scales longer than the size of the blurring, while maintaining contrast at shorter length scales. Digital implementation is easy, and might be able to vary the length scale from one part of the image to another. This would alleviate the main weakness of unsharp masking as normally practiced, processing the image with a filter having a length scale that is the same even though length scales vary from one part of the image to another.

The second has long been used in the photographic community, where it is called dodging. When a photographic transparency has information that cannot be displayed within the dynamic range of the photographic paper on which it is to be printed, the photographer can intervene in the exposure and development of the paper so that different tone reproduction curves (Lamming and Rhodes, 1988) are used in different parts of the image. Note that this process is extremely interactive as performed by photographers; all the technical details of each process are guided by image contents. It is also possible, though less common, to light and expose the original scene knowing that dodging will later be used to produce the final image.

Recently, Tumblin and Rushmeier (1993) demonstrated a method for post-processing images that has similar effects to dodging. While it provides substantial improvement for certain types of problem image, its results seems inferior to those produced in the printing and photographic industries. One might hypothesize that the limitation lies within its inability to provide interaction between image content and display processing, about which more is discussed below. In this respect a `less rendered' representation, like that of Fang provides scope for higher level interaction with the image without requiring user intervention.

2. Perception is active

Elementary books on visual perception often describe the human eye as being `like a camera', with an aperture, the pupil, that controls the amount of light on the image plane, the retina, which is overlaid by a photosensitive surface, the photoreceptors. This is true enough, as far as it goes, but can be seriously misleading. The difference that is omitted from the above description - the camera has a shutter, but the eye receives light continuously - is actually very significant. It means that a camera captures a single image, and that the process of deciding what the image should contain - where the camera is pointed, how it is focussed, and so on - is decoupled from the acquisition of the image, which occurs with the variables that control the image contents completely static.

The human eye, on the other hand, appears to have no shutter, either optically or neurally. Thus, the most natural model to describe the excitation of the visual system is a set of photoreceptors, each providing a continuous excitation signal to the brain. This input drives a continuously modulated output signal that, among other things, controls head position and direction of gaze - and so the image that lies on the retina. Thus, it may be significantly more natural to consider the visual system as a feedback control system, with the current visual input being one important factor that controls future visual input. Some aspects of this control are voluntary (conscious); others are involuntary. A model like this is not so natural for photography for two reasons. First, the intelligence that positions the camera is not part of the camera. Second, there is a very slow link between image acquisition, which diminishes the influence of present input on future input. Vision systems including actuators, an important current topic in artificial intelligence, is one attempt to come to grips with the first issue. The use of video and polaroid cameras for quick proofing is an attempt within the photographic community to handle the second.

The feedback control model of vision fits well with ideas like `active perception', as advocated by Rock (1983). The idea of active perception is that the organism actively seeks the information that answers relevant questions, and is not simply the interpreter of sense input that arrives from the environment. How does a perception model based on active perception influence imaging? Let's start by considering how the third dimension is normally perceived. When the head position and direction of gaze are held constant there are a variety of cues that can be used to infer information about depth: occlusion, binocular disparity, relative size, and so on. When head position and gaze direction are allowed to vary a variety of new depth cues: particularly motion parallax. All these depth cues are useful for determining distances in depth, which allow absolute positioning in depth and orientation of objects and parts of objects. These aspects of depth are addressed in a growing body of computer graphics and virtual reality research (For example, Ware, ????.)

There is, however, another aspect of viewpoint motion that has received less attention. Many physical objects have what might be called `degenerate viewpoints', which are viewpoints from which the projection of the object has qualitative features that are not present when the object is projected with respect to general viewpoints. For example, a cube, isolated in space and viewed from a general viewpoint, has three visible sides. From one set of degenerate viewpoints only a single side is visible in projection, and it is impossible to determine whether the projected object is a cube or a square or a variety of other shapes. In the absence of other cues an observer will assume the object to be a square when it is seen from such degenerate viewpoints, just because it is a more general solution. (A square looks like a square from more viewpoints than does a cube. ) Thus, it is important to avoid degenerate viewpoints when rendering.

Note that important information can be provided by the existence of a degenerate viewpoint in an image. There is a set of degenerate viewpoints from which a cube has two sides visible, neither of which are the top or bottom. If a ground plane is implied this degenerate viewpoint implies significant information about the size of the cube. (Unless contradictory information is given observers will assume the view point to be at eye level.)

How does an artist allow for observers who implicitly assume that viewpoints are generic, which amounts to saying that the results of any non-generic viewpoint are assumed to be properties of the object rather than of the viewpoint? Obviously, veridical perception requires the artist to find a generic viewpoint for each object presented. This requirement is obviously easy to fulfill for a single object, only a small number of possible viewpoints are excluded. A second object, however, excludes a further set of possible viewpoints, not necessarily correlated with the first set. And so on, as the number of objects in the scene multiplies. (Note that the more complex an object the more excluded viewpoints, so this argument is independent of how the scene is broken down into objects and parts of objects.) Before long it is no longer possible to fulfill the pictorial object of the image, and obey the complete set of viewpoint constraints. What can be done?

First, note that this discussion explicitly pushes the choice of view-point into the realm of rendering; the modeller can no longer choose the view-point without consideration for the effect of the choice on the rendered image. Second, observe that these considerations apply very differently to animation than they do to static imagery, because animation explicitly contains multiple view-points because of changes in camera position. The extra freedom associated with animation makes the description of constraints too difficult for the present discussion.

The artist has two possible strategies for dealing with static images, which are normally combined. The first is determining a hierarchy of importance among the objects. It is obvious that some objects must have geometry that is perceived correctly, while others are more tolerant of ambiguity. Judgements of this kind, of course, interact strongly with artistic objectives; currently no method exists for communicating them to a renderer. But even when the set of important constraints on view-point is thus reduced there may still be no possible view-point that allows an adequate rendering. This makes possible a second strategy, rendering different objects from different viewpoints. The result can be disambiguated object geometry, but at the cost of geometric inconsistency. Again the benefit of geometric disambiguation compared to the cost of inconsistency is a matter of artistic judgement, and no method exists for communicating it to a renderer. In addition, the inclusion of multiple view-points in a single image correctly represents the perception of an observer faced with the three-dimensional object being represented. In the usual case that the present view-point does not resolve important ambiguities the observer changes . And if there is no position that provides an adequately generic view-point the observer mentally integrates the results of viewing the object from several different view-points.

Another way that active perception influences vision is through relative colour judgements. The phenomena of contrast and adaptation are known to make important contributions to colour appearance and colour constancy. (See Boynton, 1979, for example.) They play a role when viewing natural scenes and when viewing displayed imagery. There is also another effect that is likely to be important for displayed imagery, involving reference of some kind to the gamut of the display medium. Consider the following example. Early colour television displays had a red phosphor that was predominantly short wavelength. In isolation its colour would probably be described as orange, not red. When fire trucks were part of an image their colour could be no more red than the colour of the phosphor. Yet that colour tended to be satisfactory, presumably because the viewer knew that the displayed colour was indeed the colour closest to fire truck colour of all colours available in the gamut. Colour relationships, not just to the colours present on the screen, but to all colours that ever appeared on the screen were important in making the colour satisfactory.

Later, the red phosphor was improved, moving to a longer wavelength. At that point what was the `right' way to display old programs. Simplicity would suggest showing the same RGB values, but then the fire trucks would change colour to be now the reddest colour available in the new gamut. Colorimetric precision would suggest recalculating the colours to keep tristimulus values the same, regardless of the change in phosphor. Which is right? Intuition, and experience, suggests that it depends on what you want the rebroadcasted program to look like. To make it look as good as possible display the old RGB values; to make it look like period television display the old tristimulus values. Knowing the new colour gamut, the viewer will actively interpret the missing red colours producing either the experience of poor colour rendition or a period effect. What happens in reality depends on consistency with other cues.

Here, active interpretation of perceptual input makes it necessary to make what seem like modelling judgements in the display phase of image creation. Yet the modeller is almost always absent when display occurs for computer graphic imagery. In the fire truck example, above, `modelling' turns out to be a cooperative process. Some colour decisions were made when the original production was done; others were deferred to a person who had creative responsibility when the original was reproduced. In computer- mediated image creation we would like to have image display completely under machine control. One solution is to have the machine act creatively; a more likely solution is for the modeller to leave behind `hints', like those used in font rendering,

Considering hints more abstractly, they make a statement about the image that expands what is available in the usual representation of the image, offering additional information that is used when creating the function that maps the image from its device- independent representation into an appropriate device-relative representation. Thus, they contain important image invariants that should be preserved in the display process, but that are not adequately specified in the explicit representation. We should expect these invariants, as they are better understood, to migrate into an improved representation. From time to time substantial changes in representation must be made to accommodate information that has previously not been representable. Recent research in reflective image representations is based on the notion that reflective descriptions of rendered images contain a richer set of invariants than current representations, which are based on emitted light, and are thereby illuminant-dependent.

A final interesting effect of active perception occurs when we view the screens of CRTs. In all but the darkest rooms there are many reflections from objects in the environment of the CRT, usually including an image of the user. These reflections are much more apparent in photographs of CRTs than they are in normal viewing. Why? It is usually the case that the user's attention is focussed on a small part of the screen of the CRT. A variety of head positions are possible for viewing this portion of the screen, and one is chosen that moves reflections away from the area of interest. When attention is focussed on a different portion of the screen, head position unconsciously moves to get reflections well away from the new location. These movements, which are undertaken reflexively, are not possible with a photograph. The photographed reflection rests stubbornly in the same location regardless of head motions. Defeating this response raises the attention-catching potential of the reflection, because a mechanism, head-motion, that previously sorted visual input into useful classes, images to be regarded, reflections to be ignored, is no longer available.

3. Perception solves problems

In the previous section perceptual systems are described as active. This activity is goal-directed, which means that these systems are not passively observing the environment, but are actively looking in the environment for information that solves a problem or answers a question. Often, more than one strategy is available to solve a problem in which case the observer chooses one that works given the available stimulus and context. As a concrete example consider the perception of black and white.

Encountering a surface that appears to be achromatic, which means `of the same colour as the perceived illuminant', observers often need to know whether the surface is black or white. What aspects of the stimulus control this judgement, or make such a judgement possible? The obvious, and immediate answer is that if the surface is very bright it is perceived as white; if it's very dark it is perceived as black; and if it's in between it's perceived as grey. This simple response works most of the time.

Thinking a little more deeply we should recognize that terms like `very light' or `very dark' are not so simple. Their meanings include a qualifier like `compared to other objects in the visual environment'. If there is doubt or ambiguity when applying the test in the previous paragraph, the judgement can be made more carefully, with the qualifier taken into account.

Such a judgement may still be incorrect if illumination is not uniform. Under such conditions a brightly illuminated black area may actually reflect more light than a dimly illuminated white area. A large body of psychophysical data studying such judgements show that human observers are almost always successful in interpreting lighting effects correctly, and determine which surfaces reflect almost no incident light, labelling them as black, and which surfaces reflect almost all incident light, labelling them as white.

Now, however, as a fourth level of difficulty, suppose we deliberately remove the observer's ability to make judgements about illumination. Is it possible for the observer to discriminate a brightly illuminated black surface from a dimly illuminated white one? Asking this question we discover yet another method that observers can, and do, use in telling white from black. For white surfaces have highlights that are only a little bit brighter than the remainder of the surface, while black surfaces have highlights that are very much brighter than the remainder of the surface. Even light reflected from dust particles on the surface are enough to allow an observer to make this judgement.

We now have four methods an observer can use to discriminate black from white. Do they exhaust the possibilities? Probably not. As Gibson (1966) suggests, if there is information in the light field that can be used to make the judgement, the observer can probably learn to extract it, subject only to very low level receptoral limitations.

This example has an important lesson for computer graphics. When creating a modelling system the user can be expected to want to make an object black. To do so it is necessary to have control over many more things than might be expected. First, there is the brightness of light emitted from the object. Then there is the reflectance of the object. In addition there is the overall pattern illumination. And finally, there is the surface texture of the object. The blackest object is one that is dark, in an area of illumination where there are also some bright objects, and with noticeable highlights on its surface. And if, as suggested above, there are as yet unknown characteristics that are perceived as being black, those too should be controllable.

Note that the above prescription for `blackness' is one that would be used by a designer who wishes to make a physical object, a watch strap, for example, look black. When designing physical objects it is impossible to control in advance the visual environment in which they will appear, so a robustly-designed object should share all possible cues for blackness. More freedom exists when creating images, but this freedom is often known only when final rendering takes place. Somehow the rendering system must know enough about the semantics of the image to compensate for accidental effects that occur during rendering. `Hints', suggested above are a crude way of doing so. More likely, a different, and richer, image representation is needed.

On intuitive grounds alone it is obvious that the different available methods for choosing between white and black differ in strength, or importance, and that when they conflict with one another a situation-specific dominance hierarchy must exist. An example of this exists between picture and sound when movie film is projected in a theatre. What is perceived to be the source of the sound? Temporal coincidence between moving lips and the sound of human speech suggests that there is only a single phenomenon, and the viewer must choose between visual localization cues, which locate the origin of the sound on the screen, in front of the viewer, and audio localization cues, which locate the origin of the sound to the side, the position of the speakers.

In the theatre the visual cue dominates, but this domination is easily disrupted. As little as 100 milliseconds of desynchronization between sound and picture breaks the integrity of the phenomenon, and the origin of the sound moves off the screen to the location of the speakers. The precise parameters of this effect are very stimulus dependent, another example, of an extraneous (modelling) feature that should be incorporated into the rendering and display parts of the image creation process.

The examples I have given of the problem-solving nature of perception are by no means exhaustive. In fact, a catalogue of problem-solving strategies sufficiently comprehensive to drive a deterministic rendering process based on `hinted' intentions captured during modelling is pretty-well inconceivable, not to mention the creation of hint semantics rich enough unambiguously to denote design intentions. As an alternate approach I will look briefly at the practice of artists, who approach image creation from a perspective that does not differentiate among modelling, rendering and displaying.


V. Three things we know about the practice of artists

The practice of artists is even less well-understood and codified than the behaviour of the very complex systems humans use for perceiving the world. The following few paragraphs attempt to do no more than discuss several rules of thumb I have observed, and which are pretty well intuitively obvious, with the intention of showing that they are important to consider when rendering and displaying images. They form the basis of a general argument that the artistic practice of complete integration of modelling, rendering and displaying has important lessons about how image representations must become richer, or the phases of image creation less distinct. To be fair, however, since this material is much less well explored this material exists more to show things that we might know in the future, than things that we know today.

1. Art abstracts

A work of art, whether literary, musical or visual, is organized around a small number of themes, and in this respect it differs from a randomly taken snapshot of reality. The artist avoids the infeasible cost of putting all real things into the work by using the theme to eliminate irrelevant aspects of objects that comprise the work. Thus, the details that are presented are expected by a reader listener or viewer to cohere around a theme, to contribute to the `story' that's being told. As a result the artist should and does expect the observer to pay attention to every detail: if a tree has detailed bark then the bark, and probably some aspect of the detail itself, is significant, and the observer should plan to explore whatever detail is presented.

Thus, the rendering system must make decisions about what to render or what to display affect the quality of a work, not as a display of virtuosity, as is common in computer graphics today, but knowing that the choice will be interpreted semantically by viewers. The importance of doing so is most easily seen by observing the practice of photographers.

Many interesting examples of the abstracting process, and its contribution to the rendering choices of artists are to be found in Renaissance art. For example, in Sassetti's, Saint Francis Giving his Cloak to the Poor Man, (Hall, 1992, Plate 4) the cloak is painted using a specific pigment, ultramarine, which was very expensive. The choice of the pigment, which might be considered as a concern of either the rendering or display stage of image creation, was affected by the high cost of the pigment at the time the painting was made, reinforcing the painter's theme, that something valuable was being presented. To be specific, a property of rendering or display, was in this case very properly part of colour choices made when the image was composed. This interaction is the rule in the practice of artists.

2. The Ultimate Product is Two-dimensional

Artists are aware, at the time an image is composed exactly what will be the ultimate product, and particularly in what medium it will be displayed.

Photography is probably the artistic medium closest in spirit to photorealistic rendering. In creating a photograph, the photographer arranges the objects to be photographed, chooses the position intensity and colour of the illumination, and positions the camera at a specific view-point. Then, the composition complete, the camera exposes the film, a process in which optical physics is respected completely. Development of the film, and the production of a print from the exposed transparency offers an opportunity to fine-tune the composition, but not to make any substantial adjustment. (Evans, 1959)

Each compositional activity is inter-related with all the others. The focus of this inter-relationship is the ultimate two- dimensional projection that goes onto the film. Many non-obvious aspects of the rendering process also affect the composition: the transfer characteristics of the film, optical characteristics of the camera lens, and so on. Furthermore, opportunities exist during development to compensate for some of these factors, making the overall process even more complicated. Two aspects of this process are important for the practice of rendering. First, aspects of the compositional process are part of rendering as image creation is done in computer graphics. Thus, the modeller, conceived as the photographer of an imaginary scene, needs to have control over aspects of the rendering process as part of modelling. This implies, as has been mentioned several times above, that it be possible to encode information that directs rendering in addition to the usual geometric and colour information contained in the output of the model. And since different rendering methods, like ray-tracing and radiosity, operate in substantially different ways it is necessary to have available a vocabulary describing rendering that is at a high enough level of abstraction that directives written relative to concepts encoded in the vocabulary should be interpretable in terms of any rendering method.

Second, and contradictory to the first point, the decision to change some part of the photographic process, film lens, etc., often requires a corollary decision to change some part of the model. For example, a higher contrast film makes shadows more prominent, and often requires the geometric rearrangement of objects in the model so that contours at the edges of objects are not confused with illumination contours caused by shadows. It is not the case that the photographer corrects a defective composition when the film changes, but that the relative quality of different compositions depends on the film type. Thus, it is not possible to define, by analogy with software engineering, a waterfall method for image creation. Changes in downstream activities, like rendering and display, require complementary changes in upstream activities like modelling.

3. Artists See Opportunities, not Limitations

The most important thing we can learn from artists, which largely subsumes the two points above, is to look in the algorithms of rendering and the properties of display media for expressive opportunities rather than expressive limitations. The result of changing stance in this way is more profound than is immediately obvious. Consider the problem of limited colour gamuts, as it appears in image reproduction. Realistic rendering produces a set of colour specifications that are to be displayed. Often some of these colour specifications lie outside the set of colours displayable on the output device, its colour gamut. We respond by looking for methods of transforming the set of rendered colours so as to lose as little as possible from the `exact', `as rendered' image. (Ferwerda et al. (1996) is a recent example showing how far it is possible to go in looking for perceptual processes that might be common to most observers.) The practice of artists looks instead for representational possibilities in the colour gamut of the device to be used, with the model chosen in such a way as to exploit those capabilities. The consequence, of course, is that neither modelling nor rendering can be performed without a complete knowledge of the display medium. I will return to the implications of this conclusion after giving a few peculiar examples of how artists and designers exploit their knowledge of the output medium.

Consider asking an artist to create a still-life to be photographed. When at the fruit store choosing a lemon, for example, to be part of the composition, the artist/modeller does not choose a lemon that is near the centre of the distribution of all lemons, but one that is at an extreme, with the yellowest possible colour, and as close as possible to the `ideal' lemon shape. This does not conform to psychological models of perception that suggest that a lemon is most recognizable when it is most like the average lemon, but to models that suggest that there is a prototypical lemon, and that this prototypical lemon is exaggerated compared to real lemons. Why might this exaggeration be important? The actual lemon has properties of touch and smell, and a three dimensional shape that will be only imperfectly represented in the two-dimensional image. The lemon to be imaged is chosen so that the imaged qualities, outline shape, colour, visual texture, and so on, are exaggerated compared to a typical lemon. It is safe to assume that the artist/modeller knows when choosing the lemon to be photographed, exactly which properties will be available in the ultimate display medium and chooses the lemon accordingly. This hypothesis is confirmed when the still- life is illuminated and the camera positioned. The orientation of the lemon, which affects the colour and outline, since neither is the same from different points of view, is changed for each new arrangement of light and view-point.

Similar affects can be noticed if observers are allowed to vary the colour within the two-dimensional outline of a well-known object, such as a banana, so as to make the colour the right one for that object. Consistent colour shifts are produced from the colour of the real object, consistent, that is, across observers so that different observers vary the colour in the same direction away from the colour of the real object, and across objects so that different objects are varied in colour so as to choose colours that are more extreme in hue and saturation than the colours of real objects. These results suggest that observers are, like the artist/modellers of the previous paragraph, choosing colours that in some way compensate for a shortfall of characteristics in other dimensions of the representation. The systematic behaviour of different observers provides the possibility that an observer-independent `hinting language' might be definable, as suggested several times already in this document.

Finally, an interesting practical example exists when photographing colour CRTs. The red primary on a colour CRT is usually not strong enough for the best rendition of reds. When viewing the CRT observers seem to compensate for this shortfall without too much difficulty, but the red colours are often objectionably desaturated when slides are made by photographing a CRT. Presumably observers are not taking into account the fact that the photograph is of a CRT, and are expecting instead the colour gamut that is available in transparency film. Thus, reds look undesirably washed out. By using Kodachrome slide film, which substantially enhances red, the film distortion negates the CRT distortion producing reds that `look correct'. Note carefully that this case is indeed paradoxical, in that we are actually piling one falsehood on top of another to compensate for an incompleteness in human perception, its inability to comprehend properly that the photograph is of an object with an unusual colour gamut. This example, like the one immediately above, is totally ad hoc, in the sense that the solution is not the result of a specific model, but just a fix that happens to work for a particular problem. Yet, it holds out hope that future research will be able to find enough order in the process that we will be able to create a hinting language that allows modellers to encode robust directions for rendering and displaying software that we will in the future be able to provide more satisfactory rendering.


VI. Conclusions

This paper examines the physical, perceptual and artistic implications of assuming that the process of image creation can be broken down into discrete, separable parts. It comes to the conclusion that they cannot be so separated without unacceptable compromise in the quality of the final result. On the other hand it is obvious that the separation is extremely useful from a technical point of view, and becoming more so as images spread more widely. Image creators, for example, who place the results of their work on the World Wide Web, have very little control indeed of the display software that will be used. Furthermore, partially rendered images are becoming more widespread, further diminishing this loss of control. Stringent specifications on what the receiver of an image specification can do with it are unlikely to be successful, yet it is obvious that richer image representations must be discovered so that it is possible, at least, for image receiving software to do a job that is more in accord with the intentions of the image creator. We have suggested the possibility of defining a hinting system, like that currently used for rendering fonts. The examples given in this paper are not intended to provide a comprehensive basis on which such a system can be defined, but suggestions for cases that must be handled by any such system.

Furthermore, we consider it essential that attention be paid to the efforts of practicing artists who are attempting to generalize their own practice so as to be able to produce works of art that are able to survive in a medium like the World Wide Web, where rendering and displaying are not standardized.


VII. Acknowledgements

An earlier form of this work was presented as part of the Conference on Imaging organized at Ecole Des Mines in St-Etienne, December, 1995, by Bernard Peroche and Claude Piche. I would like to thank them for the invitation to give this talk, which gave me the impetus to put into a unified form thoughts that occur scattered throughout many theses and seminars.

I have been fortunate to be able to discuss these matters with a variety of visual artists and perceptual psychologists, and have learned much from these discussions, not to mention the challenges my students have often faced with determination, to put ideas like the ones discussed here into algorithms or heuristics.


VIII. References

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R. M. Boynton, 1979, Human Color Vision, New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston.

colour sets

dithering

R. M. Evans, 1959, Eye, Film, and Camera in Color Photography, New York: Wiley.

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half-toning

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Ware, ????

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