Adaptive slices for acquisition of anisotropic BRDF

BRDF continues to be used as a fundamental tool for representing material appearance in computer graphics. In this paper we present a practical adaptive method for acquisition of anisotropic BRDF, based on sparse adaptive measurement of the complete four-dimensional BRDF space by means of one-dimensional slices, which form a sparse four-dimensional structure in the BRDF space, and can be measured by continuous movements of a light source and sensor. Such a sampling approach is advantageous especially for gonioreflectometer-based measurement devices where the mechanical travel of a light source and a sensor imposes a significant time constraint. In order to evaluate our method, we have performed adaptive measurements of three materials and we simulated adaptive measurements of thirteen others. This method has one quarter the reconstruction error of that resulting from regular non-adaptive BRDF measurements using the same number of measured samples. Our method is almost twice as good as a previous adaptive method, and it requires from two to five times fewer samples to achieve the same results as alternative approaches.