Fast Diffuse Shading Derivation for General User Augmented Reality

Abstract

A purpose of augmented reality (AR) applications is to express virtual objects realistically in actual scenes. To achieve this, the objects’ shading should be consistent with the scenes’ illumination. Although many methods have been proposed to achieve this shading consistency, they require specific light probes (such as a mirrored sphere), user annotations, or intensive scene’s geometry reconstruction. Hence, they are not particularly suitable for interactive AR applications in general user environments. In this paper, we propose a method to derive diffuse shading consistent to an actual scene by referring to an unspecified object. The object can be either a shiny or matte object as long as the surface has diffuse reflection. We experimentally confirmed that the method derives diffuse shading stably from objects with various specular shininess intensities and that the derived shadings are comparable to those derived by the most accurate conventional method. We also developed two types of systems to confirm that the method requires little user work and runs in realtime in scenes with dynamic illumination.