A Feature-Based Model of Visually Perceiving Deformable Objects
Vivian C. Paulun, Filipp Schmidt, Roland W. Fleming · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 2018
Visually inferring the properties of deformable objects is challenging, because the observable behavior of such objects depends not only on their internal properties, such as stiffness and elasticity, but also on the external forces applied to them.How does the brain disentangle these different factors when visually estimating the properties of non-rigid objects?We simulated and rendered five types of animations in which a deformable target object interacts with different rigid objects (see Figure 1).Besides this manipulation of the external factors, we varied the stiffness (soft vs. hard) and elasticity of the target, i.e. whether the object returns to its original shape after a deformation (elastic) or not (plastic), and asked observers to judge these internal properties.Plastic objects were perceived softer than elastic objects of the same stiffness.Overall, however, the responses were in accordance with the simulated stiffness and elasticity see Figure 1.