Towards Measuring of Depth Perception from Monocular Shadow Technique with Application in a Classical Painting

Depth perception is one of important abilities of the human visual system to perceive the three dimensional world. Shadow technique that offers different depth information from different viewing points, known as Da Vinci stereopsis, has been used in classical paintings. In this paper, we report a method towards measuring the relative depth information stimulated by Da Vinci stereopsis in a classical painting. We set up a positioning array of cameras for capturing images from the portrait using a high resolution camera, where the changes of shadow areas are measured by featuring the effects as point and line changes. The result shows that 3D effects of the classical painting are not only a perceptual phenomenon but they are also physically tangible and can be measured. We confirm validity of the method by its implementation even on a typical single image and comparison of results between the single image and the portrait.