Capturing Spatially Varying Anisotropic Reflectance Parameters using Fourier Analysis

Reflectance parameters condition the appearance of objects in photorealistic rendering. Practical acquisition of reflectance parameters is still a difficult problem. Even more so for spatially varying or anisotropic materials, which increase the number of samples required. In this paper, we present an algorithm for acquisition of spatially varying anisotropic materials, sampling only a small number of directions. Our algorithm uses Fourier analysis to extract the material parameters from a sub-sampled signal. We are able to extract diffuse and specular reflectance, direction of anisotropy, surface normal and reflectance parameters from as little as 20 sample directions. Our system makes no assumption about the stationarity or regularity of the materials, and can recover anisotropic effects at the pixel level.