A Basis Illumination Approach to BRDF Measurement

  • Authors:
  • Abhijeet Ghosh;Wolfgang Heidrich;Shruthi Achutha;Matthew O'Toole

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4;The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4;The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4;The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 2010

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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.