James Todd
Ohio State University, OH·Psychology
Look at a smooth object and you instantly see its 3D shape: a bump, a dent, a ridge. Yet what reaches your eye is only a pattern of light and dark.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Computer Science
- Topics
visual perception
3D shape perception
shape from shading
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Measure how human observers' judgments of 3D surface shape depend on patterns of image shading, using psychophysical experiments with surfaces that contain bumps, dimples, ridges, valleys and saddles.
- Test whether perceived 3D shape stays stable when surface materials and illumination change, including cast shadows, inter-reflections (light bouncing between surfaces), anisotropic reflections and light transmission through materials.
- Measure the luminance field (the pattern of light intensity in an image) across many scene conditions to find shading properties that remain roughly constant despite changes in materials and lighting.
- Determine how smooth variations in light intensity alone convey 3D shape when all other aspects of shading have been removed.
More about the research
Explaining how the brain recovers 3D shape from shading has puzzled researchers in both human and computer vision for decades. Computational attempts over more than 50 years have had limited success. One likely reason is that they assumed light behaves more simply than it does in the real world.
Why it matters
A better account of how people see 3D shape could improve the design of visually guided robots and autonomous vehicles. It could also inform prosthetic devices that help blind people avoid obstacles while walking or detect slippery surfaces that could cause falls.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Geoffrey Karl Aguirre
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether people with migraine and photophobia encounter a systematically different pattern of everyday light than headache-free controls, using wearable personal light-logging devices to record the visual environment.
Benjamin Balas
North Dakota State University, ND·Psychology
Test whether children aged 5–12 become better at seeing faces in noise images that match natural image statistics than in images with unnatural statistics.
Khairi Reda
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Computer Science·Early-career
Extend image-computable models of human texture perception to chart and map images, predicting which data properties the early-to-mid visual cortex retains for the viewer.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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