Light Warping for Enhanced Surface Depiction
Abstract
Recent research on the human visual system shows that our per- ception of object shape relies in part on compression and stretching of the reflected lighting environment onto its surface. We use this property to enhance the shape depiction of 3D objects by locally warping the environment lighting around main surface features. Contrary to previous work, which require specific illumination, ma- terial characteristics and/or stylization choices, our approach en- hances surface shape without impairing the desired appearance. Thanks to our novel local shape descriptor, salient surface fea- tures are explicitly extracted in a view-dependent fashion at var- ious scales without the need of any pre-process. We demonstrate our system on a variety of rendering settings, using object materials ranging from diffuse to glossy, to mirror or refractive, with direct or global illumination, and providing styles that range from pho- torealistic to non-photorealistic. The warping itself is very fast to compute on modern graphics hardware, enabling real-time perfor- mance in direct illumination scenarios.