Capturing Piecewise SVBRDFs with Content Aware Lighting

Abstract

We present a method for capturing piecewise SVBRDFs over flat surfaces that consist of piecewise homogeneous materials with arbitrary geometric details. To achieve fast and simple capture, our method first evaluates the piecewise material distribution over the surface from an image taken with uniform lighting and then find an suitable 2D light pattern according to the material’s spatial distribution, which combines both step edge and gradient lighting patterns. After that, we capture another image of the surface lit by the optimized light pattern and reconstruct the SVBRDF and normal details from two captured images. The capturing only takes two photographs and the light pattern optimization is executed in real time, which enables us to design a simple device setup for on-site capturing. We validate our approach and demonstrate the efficiency of our method on a wide range of synthetic and real materials.