Sparkle Vision: Seeing the World through Random Specular Microfacets
Zhengdong Zhang, Phillip Isola, Edward H. Adelson

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel imaging system and algorithms to infer environmental lighting from a single image of an object covered with random specular microfacets, enabling accurate lighting reconstruction.
Contribution
It presents a new approach to model and photograph specular microfacet surfaces, along with calibration and inference algorithms for lighting estimation.
Findings
Successful modeling of microfacet reflectors as randomized lighting mappings
Effective calibration and inference algorithms demonstrated
Experimental validation confirms model accuracy and pipeline robustness
Abstract
In this paper, we study the problem of reproducing the world lighting from a single image of an object covered with random specular microfacets on the surface. We show that such reflectors can be interpreted as a randomized mapping from the lighting to the image. Such specular objects have very different optical properties from both diffuse surfaces and smooth specular objects like metals, so we design special imaging system to robustly and effectively photograph them. We present simple yet reliable algorithms to calibrate the proposed system and do the inference. We conduct experiments to verify the correctness of our model assumptions and prove the effectiveness of our pipeline.
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Optical Imaging Technologies · Image Enhancement Techniques · Random lasers and scattering media
