Alternative Diffuse Lighting and Specular Reflection Approach Using YIQ Color Space for 3D Scene Visualization Using Programmable HLSL Shaders

In this work an alternative approach for diffuse lighting and specular reflections is presented that uses YIQ color space instead of traditional RGB color space. The classical illumination algorithms that rely on RGB color space may lead to unrealistic results either due to the fact that they cannot make the original color brighter (inherent limitation imposed by using the RGB color space) or produce incorrect shades when viewed from certain angles because in the calculation of the specular reflection the original texture color is not taken into account. The approach proposed in this work gets around the problem by applying illumination in YIQ color space using its "luma" component (Y). In this novel approach the diffuse lighting is capable of increasing the perceived brightness of the source texture and the resulting color is always dependant on the surface's texture and produces reasonably realistic results when viewed from any possible angle. The algorithm and its HLSL shader code are described in this work along with the experiments that illustrate the problem and the solution. The performance benchmarks are also provided, showing that the proposed approach is a viable and realistic solution for applications running in real-time.