Polygonal Light Source Estimation

Dirk Schnieders, Kwan-Yee Kenneth Wong, Zhenwen Dai

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of light estimation using a specular sphere. Most existing work on light estimation assumes distant point light sources, while this work considers an area light source which is estimated in 3D space by reconstructing its edges. An empirical analysis on existing methods for line estimation from a single view is carried out, and it is shown that line estimation for a single view of a sphere is an ill-conditioned configuration. By considering a second identical sphere, a closed form solution for single view polygonal light estimation is proposed. In addition, this paper also proposes an iterative approach based on two unknown views of just a single sphere. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data are presented.