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A Basis Illumination Approach to BRDF Measurement

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Abstract

Realistic descriptions of surface reflectance have long been a topic of interest in both computer vision and computer graphics research. In this paper, we describe a novel high speed approach for the acquisition of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs). We develop a new theory for directly measuring BRDFs in a basis representation by projecting incident light as a sequence of basis functions from a spherical zone of directions. We derive an orthonormal basis over spherical zones that is ideally suited for this task. BRDF values outside the zonal directions are extrapolated by re-projecting the zonal measurements into a spherical harmonics basis, or by fitting analytical reflection models to the data. For specular materials, we experiment with alternative basis acquisition approaches such as compressive sensing with a random subset of the higher order orthonormal zonal basis functions, as well as measuring the response to basis defined by an analytical model as a way of optically fitting the BRDF to such a representation. We verify this approach with a compact optical setup that requires no moving parts and only a small number of image measurements. Using this approach, a BRDF can be measured in just a few minutes.

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Author notes

  1. Abhijeet Ghosh

    Present address: USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Marina Del Rey, CA, 90292, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, V6T 1Z4

    Abhijeet Ghosh, Wolfgang Heidrich, Shruthi Achutha & Matthew O’Toole

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  1. Abhijeet Ghosh
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  2. Wolfgang Heidrich
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  3. Shruthi Achutha
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Correspondence to Abhijeet Ghosh.

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Ghosh, A., Heidrich, W., Achutha, S. et al. A Basis Illumination Approach to BRDF Measurement. Int J Comput Vis 90, 183–197 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-008-0151-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-008-0151-7

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