Simultaneous acquisition of microscale reflectance and normals

Abstract

Acquiring microscale reflectance and normals is useful for digital documentation and identification of real-world materials. However, its simultaneous acquisition has rarely been explored due to the difficulties of combining both sources of information at such small scale. In this paper, we capture both spatially-varying material appearance (diffuse, specular and roughness) and normals simultaneously at the microscale resolution. We design and build a microscopic light dome with 374 LED lights over the hemisphere, specifically tailored to the characteristics of microscopic imaging. This allows us to achieve the highest resolution for such combined information among current state-of-the-art acquisition systems. We thoroughly test and characterize our system, and provide microscopic appearance measurements of a wide range of common materials, as well as renderings of novel views to validate the applicability of our captured data. Additional applications such as bi-scale material editing from real-world samples are also demonstrated.