Snow seen against an overcast sky typically appears much brighter than the clouds that provide the illumination. This raises the problem of how a reflecting surface may appear brighter than its diffuse illuminant. We show that three factors are largely responsible for this visually striking effect: the law of darkening for the cloud cover, the reflectivity of the snow and the average landscape ...

Four methods, a goniometer, integrating sphere, conical mirror and biconical mirror methods, for the measurement of the diffuse reflectance and transmittance are described and compared. These have been in use for a number of years. A STAR GEM, which has been recently developed in AIST, belongs to the category of the biconical mirror. The disadvantage of the biconical mirror is that it does not ...

Shading and reflectance images, which are commonly called intrinsic images, are useful in many computer vision applications. A number of methods have been proposed to extract those images. Unfortunately, all of these methods assume diffuse only reflections and deem highlights to be outliers. To overcome the presence of highlights, usually reflection components separation is applied before attem...

Beautiful darks in bright light. That's another way of saying that reflections from the display surface are under control. Perhaps we will see advertisements like this in the future. However, such a description is vague unless the reflection properties are clearly indicated. If we were to only state the familiar diffuse and specular reflection properties, would the specifications be adequate? N...

In order to create a photorealistic VR model, we have to record the appearance of the object from different directions under different illuminations. In this paper, we propose a method which renders photorealistic images from small size of data. First, we separates the images of the object into diffuse reflection component and specular reflection component by using circular polarizers. Then, we...

In order to create a photorealistic Virtual Reality model, we have to record the appearance of the object from different directions under different illuminations. In this paper, we propose a method that renders photorealistic images from a small amount of data. First, we separate the images of the object into a diffuse reflection component and a specular reflection component by using linear pol...

Optical clearing agents can improve tissue optical transmittance by reducing the diffuse reflection. The reflection on in vivo human skin before and after applying anhydrous glycerol and 30 to 50% liquid paraffin glycerol mixed solution are investigated in this paper. From their visible and near-infrared reflection spectroscopy, all of their diffuse reflections are reduced after applying the ag...

Highlight reflected from inhomogeneous objects is the combination of diffuse and specular reflection components. The presence of highlight causes many algorithms in computer vision to produce erroneous results. To resolve this problem, a method to separate diffuse and specular reflection components is required. This paper presents such a method, particularly for objects with uniformly colored s...

A method to separate diffuse and specular reflection components is presented. The method is based on color, particularly on surface color ratio and chromaticity. We define surface color ratio as an invariant to specularity, shading and shadow and use it to detect diffuse pixels. There are three principle steps in our method: diffuse pixels identification, image normalization and reflection comp...