Caustics and Translucency Perception

Abstract

Caustics projected onto the surface carry very interesting information regarding the material they are cast by. It has been observed in previous studies that caustics could be a widely used cue for translucency assessment by human subjects. We hypothesize that changing the reflectance properties of the surface an object is placed on, and removal of the caustic pattern might impact perceived translucency of the material. We conducted psychophysical experiments to investigate the correlation among caustics, environment colors and translucency perception, and found very interesting indications that materials appear less translucent under the conditions where caustics are absent.