Image-based Participating Media

Abstract

Light transport inside participating media, like fog or water, involves complex interaction phenomena, which make traditional 3D rendering approaches challenging and computationally expensive. To circumvent this, we propose an image-based method which adds perceptually plausible participating media effects to a single, clean high dynamic range image. We impose no prior requirements on the input image, and show that the underconstrained nature of the problem (where variables like depth or reflectance properties of the objects are obviously unknown) can be overcome with relatively little unskilled user input, similar to other image-editing techniques. We additionally validate the visual correctness of the results by means of psychophysical tests.