Acquisition of Spatially-Varying Reflectance and Surface Normals via Polarized Reflectance Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel polarized reflectance field capture method combined with a statistical analysis algorithm to accurately measure surface normals and spatially-varying reflectance of complex objects, improving realism in rendering and analysis.

Contribution

The work presents a new approach that captures and analyzes polarized reflectance fields to obtain highly precise surface normals and reflectance parameters, addressing challenges of complex shapes and material diversity.

Findings

Achieved surface normal accuracy within 0.1mm/px.

Successfully captured diverse objects with varying material properties.

Enhanced the realism of rendered objects using the measured reflectance data.

Abstract

Accurately measuring the geometry and spatially-varying reflectance of real-world objects is a complex task due to their intricate shapes formed by concave features, hollow engravings and diverse surfaces, resulting in inter-reflection and occlusion when photographed. Moreover, issues like lens flare and overexposure can arise from interference from secondary reflections and limitations of hardware even in professional studios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using polarized reflectance field capture and a comprehensive statistical analysis algorithm to obtain highly accurate surface normals (within 0.1mm/px) and spatially-varying reflectance data, including albedo, specular separation, roughness, and anisotropy parameters for realistic rendering and analysis. Our algorithm removes image artifacts via analytical modeling and further employs both an initial step and an optimization step computed on the whole image collection to further enhance the precision of per-pixel surface reflectance and normal measurement. We showcase the captured shapes and reflectance of diverse objects with a wide material range, spanning from highly diffuse to highly glossy - a challenge unaddressed by prior techniques. Our approach enhances downstream applications by offering precise measurements for realistic rendering and provides a valuable training dataset for emerging research in inverse rendering. We will release the polarized reflectance fields of several captured objects with this work.