Face relighting with radiance environment maps

A radiance environment map pre-integrates a constant surface reflectance with the lighting environment. It has been used to generate photo-realistic rendering at interactive speed. However, one of its limitations is that each radiance environment map can only render the object, which has the same surface reflectance as what it integrates. We present a ratio-image based technique to use a radiance environment map to render diffuse objects with different surface reflectance properties. This method has the advantage that it does not require the separation of illumination from reflectance, and it is simple to implement and runs at interactive speed. In order to use this technique for human face relighting, we have developed a technique that uses spherical harmonics to approximate the radiance environment map for any given image of a face. Thus we are able to relight face images when the lighting environment rotates. Another benefit of the radiance environment map is that we can interactively modify lighting by changing the coefficients of the spherical harmonics basis. Finally we can modify the lighting condition of one person´s face so that it matches the new lighting condition of a different person´s face image assuming the two faces have similar skin albedos.