In this talk I will introd

uce our work charting a new course
between these two approaches. We pro

pose visual equivalence
a new standard of image fidelity that focuses

on what is visually
important to the observer: the appearance of the sc

ene consisting
of impressions of shapes materials and lighting. Unde

r visual
equivalence an image with noticeable pixel-by-pixel differen

ces
from a perfect reference can still be a high fidelity representatio

n
of the same scene provided it conveys the same impression of
app

earance. Our work is to our knowledge the first approach to
image fid

elity that permits judgments of this kind.

I will present an end-to-

end psychophysical and algorithmic
investigation of visual equivalence
and its impact on scene
modeling and rendering in computer graphics. F

or natural
illumination we measure the degree to which representations

of lighting can be manipulated without affecting object appearance. We demonstrate how the resulting metrics can motivate new
rendering a