Research on multi-scale reconstruction of water surfaces based on reflectance

Abstract

Aimed at reconstructing vivid water animations, we present a multi-scale reconstruction framework based on reflectance using video from one camera as input data. Based on traditional the shape from shading method, we build our reflectance model to reconstruct large-scale wave trend information. We then use a local algorithm to reconstruct the details of waves. By combining the two results, we can construct a more accurate height field for the water surface. To solve the problem of unsmoothed animation frames, we use shallow water equations to calculate the velocity field of the water surface. We then optimize the flatness between frames using velocity data. Finally, we propose an efficient algorithm for the reconstruction of wave tumbling based on the gradient of the height field and speed of the water surface. Results demonstrate that our method can effectively synthesize large-scale water animations with a high sense of reality, which meets user demands in many industries.