Perception-Guided Image Editing

This event is eligible for one of the 5 cultural event blogs you need to do for the semester.

Thursday, February 1, 2007
at 4:10 in Schaefer Hall 134

Perception-Guided Image Editing
Reynold Bailey
Washington University in St. Louis

Traditional artists have developed numerous techniques for creating
interesting visual effects. Many of these artists had very little
knowledge of the inner workings of the human visual system. Instead,
they viewed the human visual system as a black box and through
experimentation they learned to exploit its features. In a sense they
have reverse engineered the human visual system to learn what type of
inputs elicit certain responses in the brain. Modern research from the
fields of Biology, Physics, Psychology, Physiology, and Neuroscience
has given us better insight into the functioning of the human visual
system. Although the visual system is far from being fully understood,
the knowledge we have gained, especially of the early stages of the
visual pathway, is quite substantial.

Modern image editing software is widely used by professional artists
and novices and alike for tasks such as photo retouching, image
authoring and image composition. Commercial software packages such as
Adobe Photoshop and even free packages such as the GNU Image
Manipulation Program (The GIMP) provide powerful image editing and
manipulation features. These features, while mathematically sound,
typically do not take human visual perception into account. In this
presentation, I will discuss a new class of image editing techniques
that are designed to exploit the features of the human visual
system. These techniques can be used to manipulate apparent depth in
an image, create an illusion of motion, and direct the viewer's gaze
about the scene.