Eigenbubbles: An Enhanced Apparent BRDF Representation

In this paper we address the problem of relighting faces in presence of cast shadows and specularities. We present a solution to this problem by capturing the spatially varying Apparent Bidirectional Reflectance Functions (ABRDF) fields of human faces using Spline Modulated Spherical Harmonics and representing them using a few salient spherical functions called Eigenbubbles. Through extensive experiments on the Extended Yale B and the CMU PIE benchmark datasets we demonstrate that the proposed method clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in synthesized image quality. Furthermore, we show that our framework allows for ABDRF field compression and can also be used to enhance performance of face recognition algorithms.