Image-based illumination for electronic display of artistic paintings

Visual impressions from two-dimensional artistic paintings greatly vary under different illumination conditions, but this effect has been largely overlooked in most poster productions and electronic display. The light-dependent impressions are more pronounced in oil paintings and they arise mainly from the nondiffuse specular reflectances. We present an efficient method of representing the variability of lighting conditions on artistic paintings utilizing both simple empirical reflectance models and an image-based lighting method. The Lambertian and Phong models account for a significant portion of image variations depending on illumination directions, and residual intensity and color variations that cannot be explained by the reflection models are processed in a manner that is similar to the image-based lighting methods. Our technique allows brush strokes and paint materials to be clearly visible with relatively low data dimensionality.