Human lightness perception is guided by simple assumptions about reflectance and lighting
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two successful approaches to understanding lightness perception that have developed along largely independent paths are anchoring theory and Bayesian theories. Anchoring theory is a set of rules that predict lightness percepts under a wide range of conditions (Gilchrist, 2006). Some of these rules are difficult to motivate, e.g., larger surfaces tend to look lighter than small surfaces. Bayesian theories rely on probabilistic assumptions about lighting and surfaces, and model percepts as rational inferences from these assumptions combined with sensory data. Here I reconcile these two approaches by showing that many rules of anchoring theory follow from simple assumptions about lighting and reflectance. I describe a Bayesian theory that makes the following assumptions. (1) Reflectances follow a broad, asymmetric normal distribution. (2) Lighting consists of multiplicative and additive components (Adelson, 2000). (3) The proportion of additive light tends to be low. These assumptions predict the main rules of anchoring theory, including: (a) The highest luminance in a scene looks white, and (b) other luminances have lightnesses that are proportional to luminance. (c) A reflectance range less than 30:1 is adjusted towards 30:1. (d) When a low-luminance region becomes larger, its lightness increases, and the lightness of all other regions also increases. (e) The luminance threshold for glow increases with patch size. (f) Lightness constancy is better in scenes containing many distinct luminance patches. Thus anchoring theory can be formulated naturally in a Bayesian framework, and seemingly idiosyncratic properties of lightness perception are rational consequences of simple assumptions about lighting and reflectance. Meeting abstract presented at OSA Fall Vision 2012
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it