GPU-friendly rendering for illumination adjustable images

An illumination adjustable image (IAI) contains a large number of pre-recorded reference images under various lighting directions. It describes the appearance of a scene illuminated under various lighting directions. Synthesized images about the scene illuminated by complicated lighting conditions are generated from those reference images. This paper presents practical and real-time rendering methods for IAIs based on spherical Gaussian kernel functions (SGKFs). The lighting property of an IAI is represented by a few number of lightmaps. With those lightmaps, we can use consumer-level graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform the rendering process. The rendering methods for directional light source, point light source and slide projector are discussed. Compared with the conventional spherical harmonic (SH) approach, the proposed SGKF approach offers similar distortion performance but it consumes less graphics memory and has a faster rendering speed. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.