Modeling yarn-level geometry from a single micro-image

Different types of cloth show distinctive appearances owing to their unique yarn-level geometrical details. Despite its importance in applications such as cloth rendering and simulation, capturing yarn-level geometry is nontrivial and requires special hardware, e.g., computed tomography scanners, for conventional methods. In this paper, we propose a novel method that can produce the yarn-level geometry of real cloth using a single micro-image, captured by a consumer digital camera with a macro lens. Given a single input image, our method estimates the large-scale yarn geometry by image shading, and the fine-scale fiber details can be recovered via the proposed fiber tracing and generation algorithms. Experimental results indicate that our method can capture the detailed yarn-level geometry of a wide range of cloth and reproduce plausible cloth appearances.