Estimation of diffuse and specular appearance

To account for the variability of object appearance due to differences in illumination, attention has recently been focused on representing the set of images for all possible lighting conditions. Approaches that address this problem have primarily focused on lighting differences for diffuse reflection using the Lambertian model; however specular reflections can additionally present considerable disparity in appearance. We present a method for representing illumination appearance for both diffuse and specular reflections for objects of uniform surface roughness using four photometric images. This approach uses separation of reflection components, extracts surface reflectances and roughness, and produces arbitrary lighting images without explicit computation of surface shape. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method for constructing diffuse and specular appearances