The Interpretation of Line Drawings with Contrast Failure and Shadows

Abstract

In line drawings derived from real images, lines may be missing due to contrast failure and objects with curved surfaces may cast shadows from multiple light sources. This paper shows that it is the presence of shadows, rather than contrast failure, that renders the line drawing labelling problem NP-complete. However, shadows are a valuable visual cue, since their presence is formally shown to reduce the average ambiguity of drawings. This is especially true when constraints concerning shadow formation are employed to differentiate shadow and non-shadow lines. The extended junction constraint, concerning straight lines colinear with junctions, compensates the loss of information caused by contrast failure. In fact, we observe the contrast failure paradox: a drawing is sometimes less ambiguous when lines are partly missing due to contrast failure. It is known that the coplanarity of sets of object vertices can be deduced from the presence of straight lines in the drawing. This paper shows that these coplanarity constraints are robust to the presence of contrast failure.