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SUMMARY:: Visual Perception of Materials and their Properties - Prof. Rola
 nd W. Fleming\, PhD  Kurt Koffka Professor of Experimental Psychology\,  J
 ustus-Leibig University Giessen     
DTSTART:20180223T163000Z
DTEND:20180223T173000Z
UID:TALK100258@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Louise White
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: Under typical viewing conditions\, human observers e
 ffortlessly recognize materials and infer their physical\, functional and 
 multisensory properties at a glance. Without touching materials\, we can u
 sually tell what they would feel like\, and we enjoy vivid visual intuitio
 ns about how they are likely to respond to external forces\, allowing us t
 o predict their behaviour as we interact with them. These achievements are
  impressive because the retinal image of a material results from extremely
  complex physical processes (e.g. sub-surface light transport\; visco-elas
 tic fluid flow). Due to their extreme diversity\, mutability and complexit
 y\, materials represent a particularly challenging class of visual stimuli
 \, so understanding how we recognize materials\, estimate their properties
 \, predict their behaviour\, and interact with them could give us more gen
 eral insights into visual processing and internal models of the physical w
 orld. What is ‘material appearance’\, and how do we measure it and mod
 el it? How are material properties estimated and represented? Discussing t
 hese questions causes us to scrutinize the basic assumptions of ‘mid-lev
 el vision’ that prevail in theories of human vision\, and gives hints at
  how to build a machine vision system that could learn materials from pass
 ive and active observations.\n\nBio: Roland Fleming read PPP at Oxford\, a
 nd did his PhD at MIT.  After a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Bi
 ological Cybernetics\, he joined Giessen University\, where he is currentl
 y the Kurt Koffka Professor of Experimental Psychology.  His research comb
 ines psychophysics\, neural modelling\, computer graphics and image analys
 is to understand how the brain estimates the physical properties of object
 s. In 2013 he was awarded the Young Investigator Award by the Vision Scien
 ces Society\, and in 2016 an ERC Consolidator Award for the project “SHA
 PE: On the perception of growth\, form and process”.\n\n 
LOCATION:Ground Floor Lecture Theatre\, Department of Psychology
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