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Kriegman Research Group : Image-based Rendering and Reconstruction of Surfaces with Arbitrary BRDFs

Kriegman Research Group

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Image-based Rendering and Reconstruction of Surfaces with Arbitrary BRDFs
This project is a cooperative work between researchers at UIUC and Yale University.

Surface properties of many real-life objects often cannot be effectively captured by any existing lighting models (such as Phong). Not only can the reflectance properties be arbitrary, but they can also vary over the entire surface. The goal of this project is to address this problem. Specifically, how to reconstruct the surface of an object with arbitrary, spacially varying, BRDF and how to render synthetic images of that object under novel illumination.

The resulting method allows to reconstruct surfaces of such objects. It works by exploiting the fact that the radiance along a ray of light is constant. The method requires a callibrated light source and camera setup to gather a set of images under known lighting conditions, where the light source is moved on a star-shaped surface around the object. By double-covering the incident light field to the scene, as the light source is moved over two non-intersecting surfaces around the object, it is possible to recover the surface depth:

Once the geometry of the scene is known, it is possible to render new images under arbitrary lighting conditions using a modified image-based rendering technique. In addition, it is possible to render scenes with real and artificial objects. Below is an example of a scene rendered using Blue Moon Rendering Tools ray tracer. The object in the center is a real object captured using this technique and rendered into the scene using a custom surface shader, that used an extended image-based rendering technique.

This method can be also applied to video footage. Image-based models can be automatically composited into dynamically-lit real environments. The method preserves all illumination effects such as shadows and shading:

For more information about this project, see:

Sebastian Magda, David J. Kriegman, Tood Zickler, and Peter N. Belhumeur.
"Beyound Lambert: Reconstructing Surfaces with Arbitrary BRDFs,"
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, June 2001.
Melissa Koudelka, Peter N. Belhumeur, Sebastian Magda, and David J. Kriegman.
"Image-based Modeling and Rendering of Surfaces with Arbitrary BRDFs,"
Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, December 2001.

Movies:

AVI movie (1,652kB) - narrated clip showing two rendered sequences of objects with complex BRDFs
AVI movie (6,216kB) - narrated clip describing our video composition technique

Updated : Aug 31 2001

Last updated : May 05 2004
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