Difference sphere: an approach to near light source estimation

We present a novel approach for estimating lighting sources from a single image of a scene that is illuminated by near point light sources, directional light sources and ambient light. We propose to employ a pair of reference spheres as light probes and introduce the difference sphere that we acquire by differencing the intensities of two image regions of the reference spheres. Since the effect by directional light sources and ambient light is eliminated by differencing, the key advantage of considering the difference sphere is that it enables us to estimate near point light sources including their radiance, which has been difficult to achieve in previous efforts where only distant directional light sources were assumed. We also show that analysis of gray level contours on spherical surfaces facilitates separate identification of multiple combined light sources and is well suited to the difference sphere. Once we estimate point light sources with the difference sphere, we update the input image by eliminating their influence and then estimate other remaining light sources, that is, directional light sources and ambient light. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the entire algorithm with experimental results.