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The importance of ‘mass’ in line drawings of faces
Author(s) -
Bruce Vicki,
Hanna Elias,
Dench Neal,
Healey Pat,
Burton Mike
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.2350060705
Subject(s) - luminance , line (geometry) , portrait , component (thermodynamics) , line drawings , psychology , identifiability , artificial intelligence , computer graphics (images) , art , visual arts , computer vision , computer science , mathematics , geometry , engineering drawing , physics , machine learning , engineering , thermodynamics
Previous research (Davies, Ellis and Shepherd, 1978; Rhodes, Brennan and Carey, 1987) has shown that accurate line drawings of familiar faces are identified rather poorly. However, artists can produce lifelike portraits with pen and ink, and Pearson and Robinson (1985) described an automatic method for producing computer‐drawn sketches (‘cartoons’) of faces which appear very similar to those produced by a human artist. In this paper we show that subjects can identify famous faces depicted in such computer‐drawn ‘cartoons’ almost as well as full grey‐scale images. The cartoon algorithm comprises two components. One component draws lines at the locations of intensity changes corresponding to luminance valleys and edges (the ‘valledge’ detector). The other component applies a ‘threshold’ to the original intensity distribution, and replaces any area darker than threshold with black. Thus the full cartoon contains both ‘line’ and ‘mass’. Neither the valledges nor the threshold components alone were as well identified as full cartoons containing both components. The results suggest that the addition of the threshold component adds significantly to the identifiability of line drawings of faces.