Lighting and Shadow Techniques for Realistic 3D Synthetic Object Compositing in Images

Artificial 3D object compositing has recently gained interest in the context of emerging augmented and virtual reality technology. The problem takes as input the initial scene and places a 3D object anywhere within it, rendering a realistic output. This approach is challenging in the absence of prior knowledge of scene geometry, or user annotation to approximate it. Single images of a scene may not reveal all the present illumination conditions, nor reliable depth information. The state-of-the-art methods do not account for compositing 3D objects in between existing scene topology, nor cater for the inclusion of objects behind transparent areas within the original scene. We contribute a framework capable of realistic 3D object compositing with physically accurate soft shadows into a 2D scene derived from a stereo image pair which does not rely on the user's scene annotations for recreating a realistic result or on the availability of RGB-D capable hardware. The benefit of this approach is that hardware information and user knowledge are not required factors in either the 3D reconstruction stage, nor the compositing stage of the framework. We conclude with a stepby-step analysis across all of the stages of the pipeline.