Real-time photometric registration from arbitrary geometry

Visually coherent rendering for augmented reality is concerned with seamlessly blending the virtual world and the real world in real-time. One challenge in achieving this is the correct handling of lighting. We are interested in applying real-world light to virtual objects, and compute the interaction of light between virtual and real. This implies the measurement of the real-world lighting, also known as photometric registration. So far, photometric registration has mainly been done through capturing images with artificial light probes, such as mirror balls or planar markers, or by using high dynamic range cameras with fish-eye lenses. In this paper, we present a novel non-invasive system, using arbitrary scene geometry as a light probe for photometric registration, and a general AR rendering pipeline supporting real-time global illumination techniques. Based on state of the art real-time geometric reconstruction, we show how to robustly extract data for photometric registration to compute a realistic representation of the real-world diffuse lighting. Our approach estimates the light from observations of the reconstructed model and is based on spherical harmonics, enabling plausible illumination such as soft shadows, in a mixed virtual-real rendering pipeline.