Estimating light vectors in real time

Capturing the appearance of objects under different lighting conditions is useful in texture acquisition, bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) measurement, and image-based data acquisition. With the acquired data, we can render virtual objects realistically. During the data capture, we must record both the radiance and the light vector. Measuring the light vector is not necessarily easy. We propose a capturing system that estimates the light vector by applying a vision-based technique. It lets the user freely position a handheld light source during capture. The system estimates light-source orientation in real time through a Web cam mounted on the light source. Software running on an ordinary PC analyzes images from the Web cam to recognize the light source direction (the light vector). Our goal is to design a low-cost, portable, and adaptable system. Vision-based approaches offer such characteristics. We use a pose-estimation system to acquire image-based data for relighting.