The rapid development of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
applications over the past years has created the need to quickly and accurately scan
the real world to populate immersive, realistic virtual environments for the end
user to enjoy. While geometry processing has already gone a long way towards that
goal, with self-contained solutions commercially available for on-site acquisition of
large scale 3D models, capturing the appearance of the materials that compose
those models remains an open problem in general uncontrolled environments.
The appearance of a material is indeed a complex function of its geometry,
intrinsic physical properties and furthermore depends on the illumination conditions
in which it is observed, thus traditionally limiting the scope of reflectometry
to highly controlled lighting conditions in a laboratory setup. With the rapid development
of digital photography, especially on mobile devices, a new trend in the
appearance modelling community has emerged, that investigates novel acquisition
methods and algorithms to relax the hard constraints imposed by laboratory-like
setups, for easy use by digital artists. While arguably not as accurate, we demonstrate
the ability of such self-contained methods to enable quick and easy solutions
for on-site reflectometry, able to produce compelling, photo-realistic imagery.
In particular, this dissertation investigates novel methods for on-site acquisition
of surface reflectance based on off-the-shelf, commodity hardware. We successfully
demonstrate how a mobile device can be utilised to capture high quality
reflectance maps of spatially-varying planar surfaces in general indoor lighting
conditions. We further present a novel methodology for the acquisition of highly
detailed reflectance maps of permanent on-site, outdoor surfaces by exploiting
polarisation from reflection under natural illumination.
We demonstrate the versatility of the presented approaches by scanning various
surfaces from the real world and show good qualitative and quantitative agreement
with existing methods for appearance acquisition employing controlled or
semi-controlled illumination setups.Open Acces
