The current global economy has increased international competition and the need to improve the quality of many manufactured products. Appearance measurements are used to determine the quality and acceptability of a variety of products from textiles to machine finishes. Since the manufacture and marketing of these products is international in scope, the methods, instruments, and standards for th...

intro for the special issue

A fundamental problem in image analysis is to understand the nature of the computations and mechanisms that provide information about the material properties of surfaces. Information about a surface’s 3D shape, optics, illumination field, and atmospheric conditions are conflated in the image, which must somehow be disentangled to derive the properties of surfaces. It was recently suggested that...

Realistic images are a puzzle because they serve as visual representations of objects while also being objects themselves. When we look at an image we are able to perceive both the properties of the image and the properties of the objects represented by the image. Research on image quality has typically focused improving image properties (resolution, dynamic range, frame rate, etc.) while ignor...

Maki-e is a traditional Japanese decorative technique that uses the natural lacquer Urushi and metal powders. In 2014, there exist only two companies that manufacture silver powder for the purpose of Maki-e, and this study focuses on comparing the powders manufactured by them. Gloss and color of each silver powder were measured after Maki-e decoration was finished, and EDS (energy-dispersive X-...

We i nvestigate the optical phenomenon responsible for the colored shine that sometimes a ppears at the surface of ink layers i n t he s pecular direction, o ften ca lled bronzing or gloss di fferential. I t seems to co me from the w avelengthdependent refractive index of t he ink, which induces a wavelength-dependent reflectance of t he i nk-air interface. Our experiments o n c yan and magenta...

Gloss perception strongly depends on the three-dimensional shape and the illumination of the object under consideration. In this study we investigated the influence of the spatial structure of the illumination on gloss perception. A diffuse light box in combination with differently shaped masks was used to produce a set of six simple and complex highlight shapes. The geometry of the simple high...

This study was a qualitative exploration of the effect of multiple-choice glosses and periodic second language (L2) text reconstruction on lexical acquisition. L2 readers of German engaged in a think-aloud procedure while reading a short text and retelling its content in German after each of four short sections. In each section, four unfamiliar target words (TWs) were embedded. Half of the part...