Scene surface light field representation for realistic lighting

Abstract

Existing light field-based lighting follows the representation on plane, such as the commonly used light slab. A novel light field representation on scene surface is proposed. The illumination is captured by a panorama camera on translation stage with a nonuniform sampling and calibration strategy. Sampled light rays are reprojected on the reconstructed scene to generate the scene surface light field representations for both direct light source and indirect light. This representation is more con- sistent with the actual emission and reflection of light transport than the existing ones. An accurate light source estimation and a practical indirect light resampling approach are presented based on the representation. The rendering results illustrate the realistic lighting effect, especially in spatially varying illumination.