Does Motion Increase Perceived Magnitude of Translucency?

Abstract

The visual mechanisms behind our ability to distinguish translucent and opaque materials is not fully understood. Disentanglement of the contributions of surface reflectance and subsurface light transport to the still image structure is an ill-posed problem. While the overwhelming majority of the works addressing translucency perception use static stimuli, behavioral studies show that human observers tend to move objects to assess their translucency. Therefore, we hypothesize that translucent objects appear more translucent and less opaque when observed in motion than when shown as still images. In this manuscript, we report two psychophysical experiments that we conducted using static and dynamic visual stimuli to investigate how motion affects perceived translucency.