Visible surfaces in a natural environment often have multiple components of reflectance, including a diffuse component, by which light is scattered isotropically in all possible directions, and a specular component, by which light is reflected anisotropically within a limited range of directions. The research described in the present article was designed to investigate how these different compo...

Traditional low infrared emissivity coatings based on aluminum flakes cannot own low IR emissivity and low lightness simultaneously. Herein, a new simple efficient method for the synthesis of brown Al/MnO2 composite pigments with low IR emissivity and low lightness is reported, through forming MnO2 layer on aluminum flakes by thermal cracking, then altering the shape and forming nanoshell by st...

The perception of the lightness of surfaces has been shown to be affected by information about the spatial configuration of those surfaces and their illuminants. For example, two surfaces of equal luminance can appear to be of very different lightness if one of the two appears to lie in a shadow. How are we to understand the character of the processes that integrate such spatial configuration i...