An improved augmented-reality method of inserting virtual objects into the scene with transparent objects

Abstract

In augmented reality, the insertion of virtual objects into the real scene needs to meet the requirements of visual consistency. The virtual objects rendered by the augmented reality system should be consistent with the illumination of the real scene. However, for complex scenes, it is not enough to just complete the illumination estimation. When there are transparent objects in the real scene, the difference in refractive index and roughness of transparent objects will influence the effect of the virtual and real fusion. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new approach to jointly estimate the illumination and transparent material for inserting virtual objects into the real scene. We solve for the material parameters of objects and illumination simultaneously by nesting microfacet model and hemispherical area illumination model into inverse path tracing. Although there is no geometry model of light sources in the recovered geometry model, the proposed hemispherical area illumination model can be used to recover scene appearance. Multiple experiments on both virtual and real-world datasets verify that the proposed approach subjectively and objectively performs better than the state-of-the-art method.