Neural reflectance transformation imaging

Reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) is a computational photography technique widely used in the cultural heritage and material science domains to characterize relieved surfaces. It basically consists of capturing multiple images from a fixed viewpoint with varying lights. Handling the potentially huge amount of information stored in an RTI acquisition that consists typically of 50\u2013100RGB values per pixel, allowing data exchange, interactive visualization, and material analysis, is not easy. The solution used in practical applications consists of creating \u201crelightable images\u201d by approximating the pixel information with a function of the light direction, encoded with a small number of parameters. This encoding allows the estimation of images relighted from novel, arbitrary lights, with a quality that, however, is not always satisfactory. In this paper, we present NeuralRTI, a framework for pixel-based encoding and relighting of RTI data. Using a simple autoencoder architecture, we show that it is possible to obtain a highly compressed representation that better preserves the original information and provides increased quality of virtual images relighted from novel directions, especially in the case of challenging glossy materials. We also address the problem of validating the relight quality on different surfaces, proposing a specific benchmark, SynthRTI, including image collections synthetically created with physical-based rendering and featuring objects with different materials and geometric complexity. On this dataset and as well on a collection of real acquisitions performed on heterogeneous surfaces, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed relightable image encoding

Surface analysis and visualization from multi-light image collections

Multi-Light Image Collections (MLICs) are stacks of photos of a scene acquired with a fixed viewpoint and a varying surface illumination that provides large amounts of visual and geometric information. Over the last decades, a wide variety of methods have been devised to extract information from MLICs and have shown its use in different application domains to support daily activities. In this thesis, we present methods that leverage a MLICs for surface analysis and visualization. First, we provide background information: acquisition setup, light calibration and application areas where MLICs have been successfully used for the research of daily analysis work. Following, we discuss the use of MLIC for surface visualization and analysis and available tools used to support the analysis. Here, we discuss methods that strive to support the direct exploration of the captured MLIC, methods that generate relightable models from MLIC, non-photorealistic visualization methods that rely on MLIC, methods that estimate normal map from MLIC and we point out visualization tools used to do MLIC analysis. In chapter 3 we propose novel benchmark datasets (RealRTI, SynthRTI and SynthPS) that can be used to evaluate algorithms that rely on MLIC and discusses available benchmark for validation of photometric algorithms that can be also used to validate other MLIC-based algorithms. In chapter 4, we evaluate the performance of different photometric stereo algorithms using SynthPS for cultural heritage applications. RealRTI and SynthRTI have been used to evaluate the performance of (Neural)RTI method. Then, in chapter 5, we present a neural network-based RTI method, aka NeuralRTI, a framework for pixel-based encoding and relighting of RTI data. In this method using a simple autoencoder architecture, we show that it is possible to obtain a highly compressed representation that better preserves the original information and provides increased quality of virtual images relighted from novel directions, particularly in the case of challenging glossy materials. Finally, in chapter 6, we present a method for the detection of crack on the surface of paintings from multi-light image acquisitions and that can be used as well on single images and conclude our presentation

Relit-NeuLF: Efficient Relighting and Novel View Synthesis via Neural 4D Light Field

In this paper, we address the problem of simultaneous relighting and novel view synthesis of a complex scene from multi-view images with a limited number of light sources. We propose an analysis-synthesis approach called Relit-NeuLF. Following the recent neural 4D light field network (NeuLF), Relit-NeuLF first leverages a two-plane light field representation to parameterize each ray in a 4D coordinate system, enabling efficient learning and inference. Then, we recover the spatially-varying bidirectional reflectance distribution function (SVBRDF) of a 3D scene in a self-supervised manner. A DecomposeNet learns to map each ray to its SVBRDF components: albedo, normal, and roughness. Based on the decomposed BRDF components and conditioning light directions, a RenderNet learns to synthesize the color of the ray. To self-supervise the SVBRDF decomposition, we encourage the predicted ray color to be close to the physically-based rendering result using the microfacet model. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and effective on both synthetic data and real-world human face data, and outperforms the state-of-the-art results. We publicly released our code on GitHub. You can find it here: https://github.com/oppo-us-research/RelitNeuLFComment: 10 page

Accidental Light Probes

Recovering lighting in a scene from a single image is a fundamental problem in computer vision. While a mirror ball light probe can capture omnidirectional lighting, light probes are generally unavailable in everyday images. In this work, we study recovering lighting from accidental light probes (ALPs) -- common, shiny objects like Coke cans, which often accidentally appear in daily scenes. We propose a physically-based approach to model ALPs and estimate lighting from their appearances in single images. The main idea is to model the appearance of ALPs by photogrammetrically principled shading and to invert this process via differentiable rendering to recover incidental illumination. We demonstrate that we can put an ALP into a scene to allow high-fidelity lighting estimation. Our model can also recover lighting for existing images that happen to contain an ALP.Comment: CVPR2023. Project website: https://kovenyu.com/ALP

Scalable Exploration of Complex Objects and Environments Beyond Plain Visual Replication​

Digital multimedia content and presentation means are rapidly increasing their sophistication and are now capable of describing detailed representations of the physical world. 3D exploration experiences allow people to appreciate, understand and interact with intrinsically virtual objects. Communicating information on objects requires the ability to explore them under different angles, as well as to mix highly photorealistic or illustrative presentations of the object themselves with additional data that provides additional insights on these objects, typically represented in the form of annotations. Effectively providing these capabilities requires the solution of important problems in visualization and user interaction. In this thesis, I studied these problems in the cultural heritage-computing-domain, focusing on the very common and important special case of mostly planar, but visually, geometrically, and semantically rich objects. These could be generally roughly flat objects with a standard frontal viewing direction (e.g., paintings, inscriptions, bas-reliefs), as well as visualizations of fully 3D objects from a particular point of views (e.g., canonical views of buildings or statues). Selecting a precise application domain and a specific presentation mode allowed me to concentrate on the well defined use-case of the exploration of annotated relightable stratigraphic models (in particular, for local and remote museum presentation). My main results and contributions to the state of the art have been a novel technique for interactively controlling visualization lenses while automatically maintaining good focus-and-context parameters, a novel approach for avoiding clutter in an annotated model and for guiding users towards interesting areas, and a method for structuring audio-visual object annotations into a graph and for using that graph to improve guidance and support storytelling and automated tours. We demonstrated the effectiveness and potential of our techniques by performing interactive exploration sessions on various screen sizes and types ranging from desktop devices to large-screen displays for a walk-up-and-use museum installation. KEYWORDS - Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, Interactive Lenses, Focus-and-Context, Annotated Models, Cultural Heritage Computing