Handheld reflectance acquisition of paintings

Relightable photographs are alternatives to traditional photographs as they provide a richer viewing experience. However, the complex acquisition systems of existing techniques have restricted its usage to specialized setups. We introduce an easy-to-use and affordable solution for using smartphones to acquire the reflectance of paintings and similar almost-planar objects like tablets, engravings and textile. Our goal is to enable interactive relighting of such artifacts by everyone. In our approach, we non-uniformly sample the reflectance functions by moving the LED light of a smartphone and simultaneously tracking the position of the smartphone by using its camera. We then propose a compressive-sensing based approach for reconstructing the light transport matrix from the non-uniformly sampled data. As shown with experiments, we accurately reconstruct the light transport matrix that can then be used to create relightable photographs.