Perceptually Optimised Illumination for Seamless Composites

Abstract

Realistic illumination in composition is important for a seamless mixture between the virtual and real world objects in visual effects and mixed reality. The seamlessness is the measure of how perceivably apparent the synthetic object in the final composition is, and how indistinguishable it is from the photographed scene. Given that the ultimate receiver of image information is the human eye, the metric is determined by the Human Visual System (HVS). We conducted a series of psychophysical studies to observe and capture the thresholds of the HVS's ability to perceive illumination inconsistencies between the rendered subject and the photographed scene. Based on our observations, we find perceptually optimised thresholds for reducing resources across resolution and dynamic range of the radiance map (RM) for image based lighting (IBL). We evaluated our thresholds to illuminate virtual objects for seamless composition with photographed scenes.