Douglas M. DeCarlo Rutgers U, New Brunswick
We propose to show that non-photorealistic renderings which exhibit meaningful abstraction are easily understood. Abstract images are designed to make meaningful structure clear. We have worked on the interactive transformation of photographs into versions which manifest meaningful abstraction by drawing on eye movement data [DeCarlo & Santella SIGGRAPH 2002, Santella & DeCarlo NPAR 2002]. Over the next year, we intend to carry out psychophysical experiments that could both validate our interactive technique, and provide new ways of learning more about human vision eye movements, in particular. This is high-risk research. Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is an established field, but has never been evaluated. Psychophysical methods are typically applied to simple patterns (i.e. dots and blobs). However, our method already involves a close link between NPR and perception and psychophysics, and our lab maintains close connections with psychophysicists including Eileen Kowler and Thomas Papathomas (both are, like us, affiliated with the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science). Many simple conjectures and experiments can be stated naturally in our framework; we believe we can obtain compelling results.
