Visual chatter in the real world

Abstract

When a scene is lit by a source of light, the radiance of each point in the scene can be viewed as having two components, namely, direct and global. Recently, an efFIcient separation method has been proposed that uses high frequency illumination patterns to measure the direct and global components of a scene. The global component could arise from not only interreflections but also subsurface scattering within translucent surfaces and volumetric scattering by participating media. In this paper, we use this method to measure the direct and global components of a variety of natural and man-made materials. The computed direct and global images provide interesting insights into the scattering properties of common real-world materials. We have also measured the two components for a 3D texture as a function of lighting direction. This experiment shows that the global component of a BTF tends vary smoothly with respect to the lighting direction compared to the direct component of the BTF. Finally, we apply the separation method to a translucent object for different imaging and illumination scales (resolutions). The results obtained show how the BSSDRF of the object gradually reduces to a BRDF as one goes from fine to coarse scale. All the measurement results reported here, as well as several others, can be viewed as high resolution images at http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/separation/separation.php.