Practical Image-Based Relighting and Editing with Spherical-Harmonics and Local Lights

Abstract

We present a practical technique for image-based relighting under environmental illumination which greatly reduces the number of required photographs compared to traditional techniques, while still achieving high quality editable relighting results. The proposed method employs an optimization procedure to combine spherical harmonics, a global lighting basis, with a set of local lights. Our choice of lighting basis captures both low and high frequency components of typical surface reflectance functions while generating close approximations to the ground truth with an order of magnitude less data. This technique benefits the acquisition process by reducing the number of required photographs, while simplifying the modification of reflectance data and enabling artistic lighting edits for post-production effects. Here, we demonstrate two desirable lighting edits, modifying light intensity and angular width, employing the proposed lighting basis.