Illumination estimation from shadow and incomplete object shape captured by an RGB-D camera

Optical consistency between the real world and the virtual objects is one of the important issues in Augmented Reality (AR). This paper proposes a method to estimate illuminations from an object shadow and incomplete object shape information captured by an RGB-D camera. The environmental illumination can be estimated without any prior knowledge of the object shape. The radiance of each light source is computed by solving linear equations derived from color and depth images. Since a priori knowledge of object shape is not necessary, we can flexibly use/combine any objects. Thus, we can use/combine multiple objects in the target scene to increase the accuracy and flexibility. Experimental results show the characteristics of our proposed method.