Justine Giroux, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, is interested in the human perception of virtual lighting, which is used in a number of artistic fields. It was her interest in science and her creative side that motivated her to undertake a research project in the laboratory of Professor Jean-François Lalonde, Deputy Scientific Director at the Intelligence and Data Institute.

The research group has been working for several years on methods for extrapolating the lighting conditions of an image and recreating them on a virtual object. “The brain can be tricked easily on certain aspects like lighting, but it’s good at perceiving what seems unrealistic to it”, says the PhD student.

The aim of her project is to create a metric for discovering the most realistic lighting conditions of a virtual object according to the human eye. “Current metrics are not adapted. They compare light and its intensity pixel by pixel, but what they consider adequate doesn’t correspond to human perception,” explains Justine Giroux.

To develop a new metric that addresses these shortcomings, the PhD student needed to know what human perception was. She therefore created an experiment to determine which lighting conditions were considered most realistic by the participants. Installed in front of a computer screen, in a completely dark room, they had to select their preferred lighting from several representations of a virtual object.

Read the article on the ULaval Nouvelles website (in French)