A Theory of Inverse Light Transport

  • Authors:
  • Steven M. Seitz;Yasuyuki Matsushita;Kiriakos N. Kutulakos

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington;Microsoft Research Asia;University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • ICCV '05 Proceedings of the Tenth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this paper we consider the problem of computing and removing interreflections in photographs of real scenes. Towards this end, we introduce the problem of inverse light transport 驴 given a photograph of an unknown scene, decompose it into a sum of n-bounce images, where each image records the contribution of light that bounces exactly n times before reaching the camera. We prove the existence of a set of interreflection cancelation operators that enable computing each n-bounce image by multiplying the photograph by a matrix. This matrix is derived from a set of "impulse images" obtained by probing the scene with a narrow beam of light. The operators work under unknown and arbitrary illumination, and exist for scenes that have arbitrary spatially-varying BRDFs. We derive a closed-form expression for these operators in the Lambertian case and present experiments with textured and untextured Lambertian scenes that confirm our theory驴s predictions.