Inverse Light Design for High-occlusion Environments

Lighting design is a demanding but very important task in computer cinematography, games and architectural design. Computer-assisted lighting design aims at providing the designers with tools to describe the desired outcome and derive a suitable lighting configuration to match their goal. In this paper, we present an automatic approach to the inverse light source emittance and positioning problem, based on a layered linear / non-linear optimization strategy and the introduction of a special light source indexing according to the compatibility of each individual luminary position with the desired illumination. Our approach is independent of a particular light transport model and can quickly converge to an appropriate and plausible light configuration that approximates the desired illumination and can handle environments with high occlusion.