Overview
CoSPE is a research project at the Computer Vision and Media Technology
Laboratory, Aalborg University
that is in part funded by the Danish Technical
Research Council (STVF) 2005-2007.
The project aims at estimating
light source and material properties, i.e., illumination conditions
and reflectances, given an image or a sequence of images of a
scene. The approach is to exploit what we call a
"hypothesize-synthesize-correlate-update" verification
strategy. This is a special version of the classical
"predict-match-update" loop in model-based control systems where
the state of a system is predicted from a model, the predicted state
is matched to the measured state and any discrepancies are used to
update the model. The "hypothesis-synthesis-correlate-update"
strategy will combine information from two of the three image forming
components (illumination, reflectance, geometry) with actual image
information and use this combination to generate information
concerning the third component.
Applications are, e.g., in
synthesising artificial images of real world environments that look
photorealistic. This requires an accurate 3D description of the scene
to be imaged including light source and material properties. Small
inaccuracies, such as a too sharp shadow or a too glossy reflection on
an object, can make the images look artificial to human observers. The
project results will also be very valuable to Augmented Reality
systems, where virtual objects are inserted into real scenes. This can
only be done realistically if the real scene illumination conditions
are known. Another important application is in robust computer vision
systems, like autonomous outdoor vehicle navigation.
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