Real-time Image Based Lighting with Streaming HDR-light Probe Sequences

This work presents a framework for shading of virtual objects using high dynamic range (HDR) light probe sequences in real-time. The method is based on using HDR environment map of the scene which is captured in an on-line process by HDR video camera as light probes [32]. In each frame of the HDR video, an optimized CUDA kernel is used to project incident lighting into spherical harmonics in real time. Transfer coefficients are calculated in an offline process. Using precomputed radiance transfer the radiance calculation reduces to a low order dot product between lighting and transfer coefficients. We exploit temporal coherence between frames to further smooth lighting variation over time. Our results show that the framework can achieve the effects of consistent illumination in real-time with flexibility to respond to dynamic changes in the real environment. We are using low-order spherical harmonics for representing both lighting and transfer functions to avoid aliasing.