Visual explanations

Abstract

Human perceptual processes organize visual input to make the structure of the world explicit. Successful techniques for automatic depiction, meanwhile, create images whose structure clearly matches the visual information to be conveyed. We discuss how analyzing these structures and realizing them in formal representations can allow computer graphics to engage with perceptual science, to mutual benefit. We call these representations visual explanations: their job is to account for patterns in two dimensions as evidence of a visual world.