Our visual experience of the world relies on the interaction of light with the different substances, surfaces, and objects in our environment. These optical interactions generate images that contain a conflated mixture of different scene variables, which our visual system must somehow disentangle to extract information about the shape and material properties of the world. Such problems have historically been considered to be ill-posed, but recent work suggests that there are complex patterns of covariation in light that co-specify the 3D shape and material properties of surfaces. This work provides new insights into how the visual system acquired the ability to solve problems that have historically been considered intractable.

我们对世界的视觉体验依赖于光与环境中不同物质、表面和物体的相互作用。这些光学相互作用生成的图像包含不同场景变量的混合，我们的视觉系统必须以某种方式解开这些变量以提取有关世界形状和材料特性的信息。此类问题历来被认为是不适定的，但最近的研究表明，光中存在复杂的协变模式，共同指定表面的 3D 形状和材料特性。这项工作为视觉系统如何获得解决历来被认为棘手的问题的能力提供了新的见解。