Why Do Line Drawings Work? A Realism Hypothesis
This addresses a fundamental question in visual perception for cognitive science and computer vision, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of why humans can recognize objects and 3D shapes from line drawings, hypothesizing that the visual system perceives them as approximately realistic images, with techniques chosen to accurately convey shape.
Why is it that we can recognize object identity and 3D shape from line drawings, even though they do not exist in the natural world? This paper hypothesizes that the human visual system perceives line drawings as if they were approximately realistic images. Moreover, the techniques of line drawing are chosen to accurately convey shape to a human observer. Several implications and variants of this hypothesis are explored.