Use of Spider Model to Decompose Complex Reflection Components

Abstract

Many object surfaces are composed of layers of different physical substances, and these are known as layered surfaces. Such surfaces have more complex optical properties than diffuse surfaces and are generally incapable of being segmented. This is because their colors change with the mixture of the optical properties of the layers, which leads to the colors changing gradually instead of sharply. To tackle these problems, we focused on surfaces with two layers, and propose a novel physical model, the Spider model. Given a single input image, our goal is to segment the colors of the image on the basis of the physical model of layered surfaces and to extract the optical properties of the two layers. The end results provide us with the approximated top layer's opacities, as well as the reflection of the top and bottom layers. The latter two are equivalent to the segmented colors of both layers. We show the results of comparison with general segmentation and digital matting. Moreover, experiments with real images show that our method is effective.