Light source position and reflectance estimation from a single view without the distant illumination assumption

Shading-based absolute phase unwrapping

Absolute phase unwrapping in the phase-shifting profilometry (PSP) is significant for dynamic 3-D measurements over a large depth range. Among traditional phase unwrapping methods, spatial phase unwrapping can only retrieve a relative phase map, and temporal phase unwrapping requires auxiliary projection sequences. We propose a shading-based absolute phase unwrapping (SAPU) framework for in situ 3-D measurements without additional projection patterns. First, the wrapped phase map is calculated from three captured images. Then, the continuous relative phase map is obtained using the phase histogram check (PHC), from which the absolute phase map candidates are derived with different fringe orders. Finally, the correct absolute phase map candidate can be determined without additional patterns or spatial references by applying the shading matching check (SMC). The experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.

Automatic Spatially Varying Illumination Recovery of Indoor Scenes Based on a Single RGB-D Image

We propose an automatic framework to recover the illumination of indoor scenes based on a single RGB-D image. Unlike previous works, our method can recover spatially varying illumination without using any lighting capturing devices or HDR information. The recovered illumination can produce realistic rendering results. To model the geometry of the visible and invisible parts of scenes corresponding to the input RGB-D image, we assume that all objects shown in the image are located in a box with six faces and build a planar-based geometry model based on the input depth map. We then present a confidence-scoring based strategy to separate the light sources from the highlight areas. The positions of light sources both in and out of the camera's view are calculated based on the classification result and the recovered geometry model. Finally, an iterative procedure is proposed to calculate the colors of light sources and the materials in the scene. In addition, a data-driven method is used to set constraints on the light source intensities. Using the estimated light sources and geometry model, environment maps at different points in the scene are generated that can model the spatial variance of illumination. The experimental results demonstrate the validity and flexibility of our approach.

Light Structure from Pin Motion: Geometric Point Light Source Calibration

We present a method for geometric point light source calibration. Unlike prior works that use Lambertian spheres, mirror spheres, or mirror planes, we use a calibration target consisting of a plane and small shadow casters at unknown positions above the plane. We show that shadow observations from a moving calibration target under a fixed light follow the principles of pinhole camera geometry and epipolar geometry, allowing joint recovery of the light position and 3D shadow caster positions, equivalent to how conventional structure from motion jointly recovers camera parameters and 3D feature positions from observed 2D features. Moreover, we devised a unified light model that works with nearby point lights as well as distant light in one common framework. Our evaluation shows that our method yields light estimates that are stable and more accurate than existing techniques while having a much simpler setup and requiring less manual labor.

Point Light Source Position Estimation From RGB-D Images by Learning Surface Attributes

Light source position (LSP) estimation is a difficult yet an important problem in computer vision. A common approach for estimating the LSP assumes Lambert's law. However, in real-world scenes, Lambert's law does not hold for all different types of surfaces. Instead of assuming all that surfaces follow Lambert's law, our approach classifies image surface segments based on their photometric and geometric surface attributes (i.e. glossy, matte, curved, and so on) and assigns weights to image surface segments based on their suitability for LSP estimation. In addition, we propose the use of the estimated camera pose to globally constrain LSP for RGB-D video sequences. Experiments on Boom and a newly collected RGB-D video data sets show that the state-of-the-art methods are outperformed by the proposed method. The results demonstrate that weighting image surface segments based on their attributes outperform the state-of-the-art methods in which the image surface segments are considered to equally contribute. In particular, by using the proposed surface weighting, the angular error for LSP estimation is reduced from 12.6° to 8.2° and 24.6° to 4.8° for Boom and RGB-D video data sets, respectively. Moreover, using the camera pose to globally constrain LSP provides higher accuracy (4.8°) compared with using single frames (8.5°).

A laparoscopy-based method for BRDF estimation from in vivo human liver

While improved visual realism is known to enhance training effectiveness in virtual surgery simulators, the advances on realistic rendering for these simulators is slower than similar simulations for man-made scenes. One of the main reasons for this is that in vivo data is hard to gather and process. In this paper, we propose the analysis of videolaparoscopy data to compute the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) of living organs as an input to physically based rendering algorithms. From the interplay between light and organic matter recorded in video images, we propose the definition of a process capable of establishing the BRDF for inside-the-body organic surfaces. We present a case study around the liver with patient-specific rendering under global illumination. Results show that despite the limited range of motion allowed within the body, the computed BRDF presents a high-coverage of the sampled regions and produces plausible renderings.

Illuminant direction estimation for a single image based on local region complexity analysis and average gray value

Illuminant direction estimation is an important research issue in the field of image processing. Due to low cost for getting texture information from a single image, it is worthwhile to estimate illuminant direction by employing scenario texture information. This paper proposes a novel computation method to estimate illuminant direction on both color outdoor images and the extended Yale face database B. In our paper, the luminance component is separated from the resized YCbCr image and its edges are detected with the Canny edge detector. Then, we divide the binary edge image into 16 local regions and calculate the edge level percentage in each of them. Afterward, we use the edge level percentage to analyze the complexity of each local region included in the luminance component. Finally, according to the error function between the measured intensity and the calculated intensity, and the constraint function for an infinite light source model, we calculate the illuminant directions of the luminance component's three local regions, which meet the requirements of lower complexity and larger average gray value, and synthesize them as the final illuminant direction. Unlike previous works, the proposed method requires neither all of the information of the image nor the texture that is included in the training set. Experimental results show that the proposed method works better at the correct rate and execution time than the existing ones.

Simultaneous cast shadows, illumination and geometry inference using hypergraphs

The cast shadows in an image provide important information about illumination and geometry. In this paper, we utilize this information in a novel framework in order to jointly recover the illumination environment, a set of geometry parameters, and an estimate of the cast shadows in the scene given a single image and coarse initial 3D geometry. We model the interaction of illumination and geometry in the scene and associate it with image evidence for cast shadows using a higher order Markov Random Field (MRF) illumination model, while we also introduce a method to obtain approximate image evidence for cast shadows. Capturing the interaction between light sources and geometry in the proposed graphical model necessitates higher order cliques and continuous-valued variables, which make inference challenging. Taking advantage of domain knowledge, we provide a two-stage minimization technique for the MRF energy of our model. We evaluate our method in different datasets, both synthetic and real. Our model is robust to rough knowledge of geometry and inaccurate initial shadow estimates, allowing a generic coarse 3D model to represent a whole class of objects for the task of illumination estimation, or the estimation of geometry parameters to refine our initial knowledge of scene geometry, simultaneously with illumination estimation.

Stochastic exploration of ambiguities for nonrigid shape recovery

Recovering the 3D shape of deformable surfaces from single images is known to be a highly ambiguous problem because many different shapes may have very similar projections. This is commonly addressed by restricting the set of possible shapes to linear combinations of deformation modes and by imposing additional geometric constraints. Unfortunately, because image measurements are noisy, such constraints do not always guarantee that the correct shape will be recovered. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a stochastic sampling approach to efficiently explore the set of solutions of an objective function based on point correspondences. This allows us to propose a small set of ambiguous candidate 3D shapes and then use additional image information to choose the best one. As a proof of concept, we use either motion or shading cues to this end and show that we can handle a complex objective function without having to solve a difficult nonlinear minimization problem. The advantages of our method are demonstrated on a variety of problems including both real and synthetic data.

Online tracking of outdoor lighting variations for augmented reality with moving cameras

In augmented reality, one of key tasks to achieve a convincing visual appearance consistency between virtual objects and video scenes is to have a coherent illumination along the whole sequence. As outdoor illumination is largely dependent on the weather, the lighting condition may change from frame to frame. In this paper, we propose a full image-based approach for online tracking of outdoor illumination variations from videos captured with moving cameras. Our key idea is to estimate the relative intensities of sunlight and skylight via a sparse set of planar feature-points extracted from each frame. To address the inevitable feature misalignments, a set of constraints are introduced to select the most reliable ones. Exploiting the spatial and temporal coherence of illumination, the relative intensities of sunlight and skylight are finally estimated by using an optimization process. We validate our technique on a set of real-life videos and show that the results with our estimations are visually coherent along the video sequences.

Surface color perception in three-dimensional scenes

Researchers studying surface color perception have typically used stimuli that consist of a small number of matte patches (real or simulated) embedded in a plane perpendicular to the line of sight (a "Mondrian," Land & McCann, 1971). Reliable estimation of the color of a matte surface is a difficult if not impossible computational problem in such limited scenes (Maloney, 1999). In more realistic, three-dimensional scenes the difficulty of the problem increases, in part, because the effective illumination incident on the surface (the light field) now depends on surface orientation and location. We review recent work in multiple laboratories that examines (1) the degree to which the human visual system discounts the light field in judging matte surface lightness and color and (2) what illuminant cues the visual system uses in estimating the flow of light in a scene.

Reflectance sharing: predicting appearance from a sparse set of images of a known shape

Three-dimensional appearance models consisting of spatially varying reflectance functions defined on a known shape can be used in analysis-by-synthesis approaches to a number of visual tasks. The construction of these models requires the measurement of reflectance, and the problem of recovering spatially varying reflectance from images of known shape has drawn considerable interest. To date, existing methods rely on either: (1) low-dimensional (e.g., parametric) reflectance models, or (2) large data sets involving thousands of images (or more) per object. Appearance models based on the former have limited accuracy and generality since they require the selection of a specific reflectance model a priori, and while approaches based on the latter may be suitable for certain applications, they are generally too costly and cumbersome to be used for image analysis. We present an alternative approach that seeks to combine the benefits of existing methods by enabling the estimation of a nonparametric spatially varying reflectance function from a small number of images. We frame the problem as scattered-data interpolation in a mixed spatial and angular domain, and we present a theory demonstrating that the angular accuracy of a recovered reflectance function can be increased in exchange for a decrease in its spatial resolution. We also present a practical solution to this interpolation problem using a new representation of reflectance based on radial basis functions. This representation is evaluated experimentally by testing its ability to predict appearance under novel view and lighting conditions. Our results suggest that since reflectance typically varies slowly from point to point over much of an object's surface, we can often obtain a nonparametric reflectance function from a sparse set of images. In fact, in some cases, we can obtain reasonable results in the limiting case of only a single input image.