Events Calendar

PhD Defense - Borom Tunwattanapong

Title: Spherical Harmonic and Point Illumination Basis for Reflectometry and Relighting

PhD Candidate: Borom Tunwattanapong

Time: Mon, May 5, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location: SAL 322

Committee:

Paul Debevec (chair)
Abhijeet Ghosh (Imperial College London)
Ulrich Neumann
Andreas Kratky (Cinematic Arts, outside member)

Abstract:

Digitally recording realistic models of real-world objects is a longstanding problem in computer graphics and vision, with countless applications in cultural heritage preservation, industrial design, visual effects, on-line commerce and interactive entertainment. The main goal is acquiring digital models which can be used to render how the object would look from any viewpoint, reflecting the light of any environment, allowing the digital model to represent the object faithfully in a virtual world.

This dissertation presents a system for acquiring spatially-varying reflectance information and relighting various surface types by observing the objects under active basis illumination. For most type of real-world objects, they are illuminated with a succession of spherical harmonic illumination conditions. From the response of the object to the harmonics, we can separate diffuse and specular reflections, estimate world-space diffuse and specular normals, and compute anisotropic roughness parameters for each view of the object.

For objects with complicated reflectance or geometry, this work proposes a system that practically acquires relightable and editable model of the objects. The system employs a combination of spherical harmonics and local illumination which reduces the number of required photographs by an order of magnitude compare to the traditional technique.

Additionally, for faces, this work proposes a novel technique to rapidly capture and estimate reflectance properties using an array of cameras and flashes. The reflectance properties can also be used to reconstruct the complete 3-D models of the face.

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Lizsl De Leon