Peer out your window. Unless you are particularly lucky, you might think that your daily view has little affinity with some of the more spectacular scenes you have taken in over the years: the granite peaks of the high Sierra, the white sands and blue waters of an unspoiled tropical island or just a beautiful sunset. Strangely, you would be wrong.
Figure 1. Images of the natural environment, such as this view of a log resting on a stony embankment (top), exhibit a surprising degree of statistical similarity. To investigate these qualities, the authors had first to remove the effects of the photographic process from their images, yielding estimates for the actual brightness (luminance) in each pixel. Because luminance spans an enormous range—it varies from about 100 to 40,000 candles per square meter in this image—linearly scaling these values to the shades that can be printed makes the scene look strangely dim and stark (lower right). Histograms of pixel intensity (yellow panels) show that the distribution of luminance values is short and wide in a light region, whereas it is narrow and peaked in a dark area. Summing the results from the three sample regions (white boxes) produces a distribution skewed toward low values, one that matches the shape of the histogram obtained for the image as a whole.
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