SPIDeRS: Structured Polarization for Invisible Depth and Reflectance Sensing

Can we capture shape and reflectance in stealth? Such capability would be valuable for many application domains in vision, xR, robotics, and HCI. We introduce Structured Polarization, the first depth and reflectance sensing method using patterns of polarized light (SPIDeRS). The key idea is to modulate the angle of linear polarization (AoLP) of projected light at each pixel. The use of polarization makes it invisible and lets us recover not only depth but also directly surface normals and even reflectance. We implement SPIDeRS with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) and a polarimetric camera. We derive a novel method for robustly extracting the projected structured polarization pattern from the polarimetric object appearance. We evaluate the effectiveness of SPIDeRS by applying it to a number of real-world objects. The results show that our method successfully reconstructs object shapes of various materials and is robust to diffuse reflection and ambient light. We also demonstrate relighting using recovered surface normals and reflectance. We believe SPIDeRS opens a new avenue of polarization use in visual sensing.

Fresnel Microfacet BRDF: Unification of Polari-Radiometric Surface-Body Reflection

Computer vision applications have heavily relied on the linear combination of Lambertian diffuse and microfacet specular reflection models for representing reflected radiance, which turns out to be physically incompatible and limited in applicability. In this paper, we derive a novel analytical reflectance model, which we refer to as Fresnel Microfacet BRDF model, that is physically accurate and generalizes to various real-world surfaces. Our key idea is to model the Fresnel reflection and transmission of the surface microgeometry with a collection of oriented mirror facets, both for body and surface reflections. We carefully derive the Fresnel reflection and transmission for each microfacet as well as the light transport between them in the subsurface. This physically-grounded modeling also allows us to express the polarimetric behavior of reflected light in addition to its radiometric behavior. That is, FMBRDF unifies not only body and surface reflections but also light reflection in radiometry and polarization and represents them in a single model. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in accuracy, expressive power, and image-based estimation.