High Dynamic Range Point Clouds for Real-Time Relighting
We propose a unified spatial approximation of the radiance and visibility relationships present in the scene, in the form of a colored point cloud. To do so, our method relies on two core components: High Dynamic Range (HDR) expansion and real-time Point-Based Global Illumination (PBGI). First, since an acquired color point cloud typically comes in Low Dynamic Range (LDR) format, we boost it using a single HDR photo exemplar of the captured scene that can cover part of it. We perform this expansion efficiently by first expanding the dynamic range of a set of renderings of the point cloud and then projecting these renderings on the original cloud. At this stage, we propagate the expansion to the regions not covered by the renderings or with low-quality dynamic range by solving a Poisson system. Then, at rendering time, we use the resulting HDR point cloud to relight virtual objects, providing a diffuse model of the indirect illumination propagated by the environment. To do so, we design a PBGI algorithm that exploits the GPU's geometry shader stage as well as a new mipmapping operator, tailored for G-buffers, to achieve real-time performances. As a result, our method can effectively relight virtual objects exhibiting diffuse and glossy physically-based materials in real time. Furthermore, it accounts for the spatial embedding of the object within the 3D environment. We evaluate our approach on manufactured scenes to assess the error introduced at every step from the perfect ground truth. We also report experiments with real captured data, covering a range of capture technologies, from active scanning to multiview stereo reconstruction.
Authors
Manuele Sabbadin, Gianpaolo Palma, Francesco Banterle, Tamy Boubekeur, Paolo Cignoni
Project page
http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2...