Authors
Paul Debevec
University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies
Portals
Summary
A Light Stage is a device which lights a subject with controllable illumination, providing the ability to create or simulate any combination of colors, intensities, and directions of illumination over the range of directions from which light can come. Just as a ”sound stage” is a place where actors can be recorded with control over the sound, a Light Stage provides control over the illumination. Numerous forms of light stages have been constructed with different types and quantities of lights and varying mechanical degrees of freedom, and the useful applications of light stages range from image-based relighting to high-resolution facial geometry capture to surface reflectance measurement. This article will describe several light stages built since in the last decade or so and the applications they have enabled.
Abstract
The Light Stage systems built at UC Berkeley and USC ICT have enabled a variety of facial scanning and reflectance measurement techniques that have been explored in several research papers and used in various commercial applications. This short paper presents the evolutionary history of the Light Stage Systems and some of the techniques and applications they have enabled.