| A surface light field is a function that assigns a color to each ray originating on a surface. Surface light fields are well suited to constructing virtual images of shiny objects under complex lighting conditions. This dissertation argues that surface light fields for 3D photography are a "hybrid" technique with features of both inverse rendering and image-based techniques. Then it presents a framework for construction, compression, interactive rendering, and plausible editing of surface light fields of real objects. The representation developed in this dissertation has features which provide improved compressibility.; Novel generalizations of vector quantization and principal component analysis are used to construct a compressed representation of an object's surface light field from photographs and range scans. The techniques of principal component analysis with missing data and probabilistic principal component analysis are also used to construct compressed surface light fields. The compression algorithms and are analyzed conceptually and numerically.; A new rendering algorithm achieves interactive rendering of images from the compressed representation, incorporating view-dependent geometric level-of-detail control. The surface light field representation can also be directly edited to yield plausible surface light fields for small changes in surface geometry and reflectance properties. |
