Analysis of Subsurface Scattering Based on Dipole Approximation

Abstract

The scattering effect of incident light, called subsurface scattering, occurs under the surface of translucent objects. In this paper, we present a method for analyzing the subsurface scattering from a single image taken in a known arbitrary illumination environment. In our method, diffuse subsurface reflectance in the subsurface scattering model can be linearly solved by quantizing the distances between each pair of surface points. Then, the dipole approximation is fit to the diffuse subsurface reflectance. By applying our method to real images of translucent objects, we confirm that the parameters of subsurface scattering can be computed for different materials.