A paint-based approach for optimal lighting design in real scenes

Abstract

Lighting design is a computational expensive task, commonly done using Computer-aided design (CAD) software in a virtual scene. The designer places and tunes the virtual light sources and, yet the virtual environment is ideal for physically correct light tracing, the costly simulation might not provide the desired impression in the real scene. Moreover, the chosen light placement is not necessarily optimized. In this work we capture light behavior from real scenes as well as 3D scene properties and use this information to recreate different lighting designs. The results approximates physical correctness while visualizing the illumination on the real scene in a more time-efficient way. To make the design process more intuitive, the user paints the desired light properties instead of placing the light sources. The system attempts to find valid positions and parameters of the light sources in the scene to reflect the current design. Constraints such as number of light sources and emission profiles as well as spatial constraints can be specified.