Abstract
In this paper, we propose an effective approach to estimating a near-surface lighting function from a limited number of images captured under different illuminations. Unlike classical methods relying on simplified parallel lighting model or near-point lighting model, our approach directly focuses on the much more realistic near-surface light source and formulates it as a regular grid of near-point light sources. We present an iterative joint optimization strategy to solve the scene normal, reflectance and near-point light source positions. Based on such new model, reliable relighting under arbitrary new illuminations can be faithfully reconstructed by applying the given lighting condition to the same scene. Experiments show that the proposed approach can generate more accurate re-lighting results than state-of-the-art competitors.