Online construction of surface light fields

Abstract

We present a system for interactively capturing, constructing, and rendering surface light fields by incrementally building a low rank approximation to the surface light field. Each image is incorporated into the lighting model as it is captured, providing the user with real-time feedback. This feedback enables the user to preview the lighting model and direct the image acquisition towards undersampled areas of the object. We also provide a novel datadriven quality heuristic to aid the user in identifying undersampled regions. Our system is an order of magnitude faster than previous systems, and reduces the time necessary to capture the images and construct a surface light field from hours to minutes.