Abstract
Translucency is an optical and a perceptual phenomenon that characterizes subsurface light transport through objects and materials. Translucency as an optical property of a material relates to the radiative transfer inside and through this medium, and translucency as a perceptual phenomenon describes the visual sensation experienced by humans when observing a given material under given conditions. The knowledge about the visual mechanisms of the translucency perception remains limited. Accurate prediction of the appearance of the translucent objects can have a significant commercial impact in the fields such as three-dimensional printing. However, little is known how the optical properties of a material relate to a perception evoked in humans. This article overviews the knowledge status about the visual perception of translucency and highlights the applications of the translucency perception research. Furthermore, this review summarizes current knowledge gaps, fundamental challenges and existing ambiguities with a goal to facilitate translucency perception research in the future.
Highlights
How different objects and materials appear to human observers is important in commerce, where customer choice and satisfaction are often influenced by the visual look of the product, and in trivial daily tasks performed by humans
We understand that eye tracking comes with the considerable limitations: the reason of the fixations might be unrelated to translucency — some regions might be salient for other reasons, for example, a human face can attract extra attention regardless the task; we will not capture the influence of the parafoveal vision and the cues which are not locally defined; the temporal resolution of the eye tracking equipment might be lower than the speed of the visual processing; the presence of eye tracking equipment might affect the naturalness of the interaction
The advance in translucency perception research is attributed to the development of computer graphics techniques which permit easier generation of the translucent visual stimuli
Summary
How different objects and materials appear to human observers is important in commerce, where customer choice and satisfaction are often influenced by the visual look of the product, and in trivial daily tasks performed by humans. The color information incident on the human retina encodes important information about the objects and materials, overall sensation depends “on the appearance of that colour due to the relationship between the light transmitted, the light reflected, and the light scattered by the body of the object” (Pointer, 2003). A translucent appearance is usually the result of a visual stimulus incident onto a retina from the objects permitting some degree of the subsurface light transport. If it is possible to see only a “blurred” image through the material (due to some diffusion effect), it has a certain degree of transparency and we can speak about translucency” (Eugène, 2008). We discuss the current challenges in the translucency perception research and outline the most important questions remaining open, which is followed by a concluding section
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