Augmented reality with automatic illumination control incorporating ellipsoidal models

In applications of augmented reality like virtual studio TV production, multisite video conference applications using a virtual meeting room and synthetic/natural hybrid coding according to the new ISO/MPEG-4 standard, a synthetic scene is mixed into a natural scene to generate a synthetic/natural hybrid image sequence. For realism, the illumination in both scenes should be identical. In this paper, the illumination of the natural scene is estimated automatically and applied to the synthetic scene. The natural scenes are restricted to scenes with nonoccluding, simple, moving, mainly rigid objects. For illumination estimation, these natural objects are automatically segmented in the natural image sequence and three-dimensionally (3-D) modeled using ellipsoid-like models. The 3-D shape, 3-D motion, and the displaced frame difference between two succeeding images are evaluated to estimate three illumination parameters. The parameters describe a distant point light source and ambient light. Using the estimated illumination parameters, the synthetic scene is rendered and mixed to the natural image sequence. Experimental results with a moving virtual object mixed into real video telephone sequences show that the virtual object appears naturally having the same shading and shadows as the real objects. Further, shading and shadow allows the viewer to understand the motion trajectory of the objects much better