Efficient acquisition of light transport based on separation of direct and global components

Photorealistic image synthesis is a challenging topic in computer graphics. Image-based techniques for capturing and reproducing the appearance of real scenes have received a great deal of attention. A long measurement time and a large amount of memory are required in order to acquire an image-based relightable dataset, i.e., light transport or reflectance field. Several approaches have been proposed with the goal of efficiently acquiring light transport [Sen et al. 2005; Fuchs et al. 2007]. However, since, with the exception of the recently proposed compressive sensing method [Peers et al. 2009], most previous studies have focused on scene adaptive sampling algorithms, conventional methods cannot perform efficiently in the case of a scene that has significant global illumination. In this paper, we present a non-adaptive sampling method for measuring light transport of a scene based on separation of the direct and global illumination components.