A Composite BRDF Model for Hazy Gloss

International audienceWe introduce a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) model for the rendering of materials that exhibit hazy reflections, whereby the specular reflections appear to be flanked by a surrounding halo. The focus of this work is on artistic control and ease of implementation for real-time and off-line rendering. We propose relying on a composite material based on a pair of arbitrary BRDF models; however, instead of controlling their physical parameters, we expose perceptual parameters inspired by visual experiments [VBF17]. Our main contribution then consists in a mapping from perceptual to physical parameters that ensures the resulting composite BRDF is valid in terms of reciprocity, positivity and energy conservation. The immediate benefit of our approach is to provide direct artistic control over both the intensity and extent of the haze effect, which is not only necessary for editing purposes, but also essential to vary haziness spatially over an object surface. Our solution is also simple to implement as it requires no new importance sampling strategy and relies on existing BRDF models. Such a simplicity is key to approximating the method for the editing of hazy gloss in real-time and for compositing

A hybrid of fuzzy theory and quadratic function for estimating and refining transmission map

© TÜBİTAK In photographs captured in outdoor environments, particles in the air cause light attenuation and degrade image quality. This effect is especially obvious in hazy environments. In this study, a fuzzy theory is proposed to estimate the transmission map of a single image. To overcome the problem of oversaturation in dehazed images, a quadratic-function-based method is proposed to refine the transmission map. In addition, the color vector of the atmospheric light is estimated using the top 1% of the brightest light area. Finally, the dehazed image is reconstructed using the transmission map and the estimated atmospheric light. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid method performs better than the other existing methods in terms of color oversaturation, visibility, and quantitative evaluation

The perception of hazy gloss

Most previous work on gloss perception has examined the strength and sharpness of specular reflections in simple bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) having a single specular component. However, BRDFs can be substantially more complex and it is interesting to ask how many additional perceptual dimensions there could be in the visual representation of surface reflectance qualities. To address this, we tested materials with two specular components that elicit an impression of hazy gloss. Stimuli were renderings of irregularly shaped objects under environment illumination, with either a single Ward specular BRDF component (Ward, 1992), or two such components, with the same total specular reflectance but different sharpness parameters, yielding both sharp and blurry highlights simultaneously. Differently shaped objects were presented side by side in matching, discrimination, and rating tasks. Our results show that observers mainly attend to the sharpest reflections in matching tasks, but they can indeed discriminate between single-component and two-component specular materials in discrimination and rating tasks. The results reveal an additional perceptual dimension of gloss-beyond strength and sharpness-akin to ''haze gloss'' (Hunter & Harold, 1987). However, neither the physical measurements of Hunter and Harold nor the kurtosis of the specular term predict perception in our tasks. We suggest the visual system may use a decomposition of specular reflections in the perception of hazy gloss, and we compare two possible candidates: a physical representation made of two gloss components, and an alternative representation made of a central gloss component and a surrounding halo component.Perceptual Representation of Illumination, Shape and Materia

Third Earth Resources Technology Satellite Symposium. Volume 2: Summary of results

Summaries are provided of significant results taken from presentations at the symposium along with some typical examples of the applications of ERTS-1 data for solving resources management problems at the national, state, and local levels