Illumination-aware Digital Image Compositing for Full-length Human Figures

In this paper, a novel compositor to realize illumination-aware digital image compositing is proposed. Digital image compositing is a technique to re-synthesize a single image from multiple visual elements. Assembling separated visual elements leads to highly efficient content creation at risk of losing visual coherence. Visual coherence has two types: positional and illumination. Compositing while maintaining illumination coherence is considered a challenging task, because light transport information is needed to reproduce global illumination effects—color bleeding, soft shadows, caustics, and so on. The pipeline of the proposed compositor incorporates shape reconstruction, as well as global illumination simulation and relighting; thus, the compositor can reproduce background-to-foreground color bleeding and soft shadows. It is empirically evaluated that the proposed compositor compares favorably with rendering both in terms of quality and speed. Because it is in principle impossible to render the foreground and background elements together, the proposed compositor is inevitably selected to generate images with the two types of visual coherence. This leads to efficient construction of photorealistic cyberworlds.

I. Introduction

Digital image compositing is a technique to re-synthesize a single image from multiple visual elements. Various types of visual content, including image, video, and Augmented Reality (AR), are underpinned by the technique.