Reflectance-Field-Based Separation of Surface Reflection Components

Abstract

Light reflected from an object to a camera is a mixture of light from specular and diffuse reflection. This has important implications for many computer vision tasks, such as image matching and understanding. Many applications, for example, digital contents production, photorealistic image synthesis, and motion analysis, may require the diffuse and specular reflection to be separated. We present an approach for separating the diffuse and specular components of object surface reflection. This approach is based on the well-known dichromatic reflection model, however it separates reflections from reflectance fields constructed for every point on a 3-D object surface. Our method can prevent having to segment image into several uniformly-colored areas. Our method can thus separate reflection from an object surface with a complicated texture. We analyzed the properties of the reflectance field constructed from original frames and showed how to separate reflection components for each 3-D point. Experiments on real scenes showed that our method was successful.