On the Influence of Dynamic Illumination in the Perception of Translucency

Translucent materials are ubiquitous in the real world, from organic materials such as food or human skin, to synthetic materials like plastic or rubber. While multiple models for translucent materials exist, understanding how we perceive translucent appearance, and how it is affected by illumination and geometry, remains an open problem. In this work, we analyze how well human observers esti- mate the density of translucent objects for static and dynamic illu- mination scenarios. Interestingly, our results suggest that dynamic illumination may not be critical to assess the nature of translucent materials.