International Program Committee: Co-Chairs

While many 3D scanning techniques can accurately record the geometry of sites and artifacts, a subject’s reflectance properties are often simplistically recorded as an RGB texture map. In reality, each point in a subject’s volume scatters incident illumination according to a complex 4D phase function unique to itself, yielding far richer reflectance behaviors than traditional texture acquisition techniques are able to model. A goal for digital documentation should be to record and render in any illumination the full gamut of diffuse, specular, translucent reflectance properties of the site or artifact ranging from wood, clay, precious metals, paints, skins, glass, and jewels. In this talk I will present three recently developed techniques in pursuit of this goal. The first is the light stage, a device which captures spatially-varying light scattering properties of artifacts by illuminating them from a dense array of lighting directions. The second is linear light source reflectometry, a low-cost process that uses a translational pass of an inexpensive neon tube light to capture the reflectance properties of a planar artifact such as a daguerreotype or an illuminated manuscript. Finally, I will present an environmental reflectometry process based on inverse global illumination designed developed to digitize the geometry and reflectance properties of the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis and to virtually reunite it with its sculptures in the British Museum. Joint work with Chris Tchou, Tim Hawkins, Per Einarsson, Andrew Gardner, Jonas Unger, Andrew Jones, Jonathan Cohen, Mark Bolas, Ian MacDowall, Charis Poullis, Jessi Stumpfel, Andrew Jones, Nathaniel Yun, Therese Lundgren, Marcos Fajardo, and Philippe Martinez. Short Biography Paul Debevec is a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and directs the graphics laboratory at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. His 1996 Ph.D. thesis at UC Berkeley presented Facade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. He subsequently developed techniques for illuminating computer-generated scenes with real-world lighting captured through high dynamic range photography, demonstrating new image-based lighting techniques in his animations "Rendering with Natural Light", "Fiat Lux", and "The Parthenon". He also led the design of HDR Shop, the first widely-used high dynamic range image editing program. Debevec’s recent work has produced several light stage devices that allow objects, actors, and performances to be synthetically illuminated with novel lighting, recently used to create photoreal digital actors for the 2004 film "Spider-Man 2". Debevec received ACM SIGGRAPH’s first Significant New Researcher Award in 2001. See also http://www.debevec.org/