Paper Weighted Separation of Surface Reflection of an Object Illuminated By Two Light Sources

Separating the diffuse and specular components from the reflection of a 3D object surface is very important for generating highly realistic synthesized images in computer graphics applications. Most research on this separation has considered only the case in which an object is illuminated by a single point light source. However, when an object is illuminated by one source, it can be difficult or impossible to acquire the real texture information of some visible regions on the object surface because of shading. To overcome this problem, we used two point light sources to illuminate the object to reduce the shaded regions. We used an iterative algorithm to estimate the intensity variation curve parameters and to compute the separation of the two components. To improve the separation quality, we used a weighting function to reduce the effect of noise contained in the highlight regions. Experiments using both synthesized and real data demonstrated that our method is effective and produces clear separation.