Purkinje Images: Conveying Different Content for Different Luminance Adaptations in a Single Image

Abstract

Providing multiple meanings in a single piece of art has always been intriguing to both artists and observers. We present Purkinje images, which have different interpretations depending on the luminance adaptation of the observer. Finding such images is an optimization that minimizes the sum of the distance to one reference image in photopic conditions and the distance to another reference image in scotopic conditions. To model the shift of image perception between day and night vision, we decompose the input images into a Laplacian pyramid. Distances under different observation conditions in this representation

Revealing information by averaging

“…In the work by Mitra et al [34], the hidden image is only perceieved when looking onto the image as a whole. Arpa et al [35] use the difference between night vision and day vision of the HVS. They conceive a combined image that is perceived as one image at night and as a different image during the day.…”