Perception of material appearance: A comparison between painted and rendered images

Painters are masters in replicating the visual appearance of materials. While the perception of material appearance is not yet fully understood, painters seem to have acquired an implicit understanding of the key visual cues that we need to accurately perceive material properties. In this study, we directly compare the perception of material properties in paintings and in renderings by collecting professional realistic paintings of rendered materials. From both type of images, we collect human judgments of material properties and compute a variety of image features that are known to reflect material properties. Our study reveals that, despite important visual differences between the two types of depiction, material properties in paintings and renderings are perceived very similarly and are linked to the same image features. This suggests that we use similar visual cues independently of the medium and that the presence of such cues is sufficient to provide a good appearance perception of the materials.