Gloss Editing in Light Fields

Abstract

With the improvement of both acquisition techniques, and computational and storage capabilities, we are witnessing an increasing presence of multidimensional scene representations. Two-dimensional, conventional images are gradually losing their hegemony, leaving room for novel formats. Among these, light fields are gaining importance, further propelled by the recent reappearance of virtual reality. Content generation is one of the stumbling blocks in this realm, and light fields are one of the main input sources of content. As their use becomes more common, a key challenge is the ability to edit or modify the appearance of the objects in the light field. This paper presents a method for manipulating the appearance of gloss in light fields. In particular, we propose a multidimensional filtering approach in which the specular highlights are filtered in the spatial and angular domains to target a desired increase of the material roughness. The filtering kernel is computed based on surface normals and view direction. Our technique generates angularly-coherent plausible edits in both synthetic and captured light fields.