Surface light fields for 3D photography

Abstract

A surface light field is a function that assigns a color to each ray originating on a surface. Surface light fields are well suited to constructing virtual images of shiny objects under complex lighting conditions. This paper presents a framework for construction, compression, interactive rendering, and rudimentary editing of surface light fields of real objects. Generalization of vector quantization and principal component analysis are used to construct a compressed representation of an object's surface light field from photographs and range scans. A new rendering algorithm achieves interactive rendering of images from the compressed representation, incorporating view-dependent geometric level-of-detail control. The surface light field representation can also be directly edited to yield plausible surface light fields for small changes in surface geometry and reflectance properties.