Relightable Buildings from Images

Abstract

We propose a complete image-based process that facilitates recovery of both gross-scale geometry and local surface structure to create highly detailed 3D models of building façades from photographs. We approximate both albedo and sufficient local geometric structure to compute complex self-shadowing effects, and fuse this with a gross-scale 3D model. Our approach yields a perceptually high-quality model, imparting the illusion of measured reflectance. The requirements of our approach are that image capture must be performed under diffuse lighting and surfaces in the images must be predominantly Lambertian. Exemplars of materials are obtained through surface depth hallucination, and our novel method matches these with multi-view image sequences that are also used to automatically recover 3D geometry. In this paper we illustrate the effictiveness of our approach through visually realistic reconstructions of historic buildings in two test cases, together with a table showing the breakdown of effort required to reconstruct each.