Representing appearance in a multimedia information system

It is now generally accepted that future information systems will allow storage and retrieval of speech, images and even full motion video and this has motivated a great deal of work in the area of distributed multimedia systems. However there are other classes of `objects´ which can be stored and manipulated using computers. The authors consider how appearance models are one important example of this. The appearance of physical objects is determined by four main factors: 3-D Shape; surface reflectance; illumination; viewpoint and camera pose