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Adaptive highlights stencils for modeling of multi-axial BRDF anisotropy

An alternative to analytical anisotropic BRDF modeling

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Abstract

Directionally dependent anisotropic material appearance phenomenon is widely represented using bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). This function needs in practice either reconstruction of unknown values interpolating between sparse measured samples or requires data fidelity preserving compression forming a compact representation from dense measurements. Both properties can be, to a certain extent, preserved by means of analytical BRDF models. Unfortunately, the number of anisotropic BRDF models is limited, and moreover, most require either a demanding iterative optimization procedure dependent on proper initialization or the user setting parameters. Most of these approaches are challenged by the fitting of complex anisotropic BRDFs. In contrast, we approximate BRDF anisotropic behavior by means of highlight stencils and derive a novel BRDF model that independently adapts such stencils to each anisotropic mode present in the BRDF. Our model allows for the fast direct fitting of parameters without the need of any demanding optimization. Furthermore, it achieves an encouraging, expressive visual quality as compared to rival solutions that rely on a similar number of parameters. We thereby ascertain that our method represents a promising approach to the analysis and modeling of complex anisotropic BRDF behavior.

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Notes

  1. http://btf.utia.cas.cz.

  2. http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/brdf.html.

  3. http://staff.utia.cz/filip/resources/stencils.zip.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and inspiring comments. This research has been supported by the Czech Science Foundation Grant 14-02652S.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Theory and Automation, ASCR, Pod Vodárenskou věží 4, 182 08, Prague 8, Czech Republic

    Jiří Filip, Michal Havlíček & Radomír Vávra

  2. Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Radomír Vávra

Authors
  1. Jiří Filip
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  2. Michal Havlíček
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  3. Radomír Vávra
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Correspondence to Jiří Filip.

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Filip, J., Havlíček, M. & Vávra, R. Adaptive highlights stencils for modeling of multi-axial BRDF anisotropy. Vis Comput 33, 5–15 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1148-1

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