Spiral Texture Mapping

Spiral texture mapping extends and combines two main categories of texture mapping approaches, namely, displacement texture mapping and view-dependent texture mapping. A spiral texture contains two components: a view-independent one and a view-dependent one. The first component contains a layered depth image, which stores the depth information and the extracted diffuse color information of the underlining object. The second component can be considered as a set of images, which uniformly sample the highlights and reflections of the object from different directions. The rendering algorithm uses the first component to solve visibility problems, and then uses the second component to produce highlights and reflections. Since spiral textures can produce both parallax effects and non-diffuse effects, they can be used to represent shiny complex real objects or environments. In addition, a novel sampling technique, which is based on the shape of a spiral, is proposed in this paper and used to sample the view-dependent component. The new sampling scheme can evenly sample all rays that pass through a planar rectangular texture. The experimental results show that our approach can generate very good results with a reasonable number of samples.