New Techniques for Acquiring, Rendering, and Displaying Human Performances March 1, 2008

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Google Tech Talks
February, 29 2008

ABSTRACT

I will present recent work for acquiring, rendering, and displaying
photoreal models of people, objects, and dynamic performances. I will
overview image-based lighting techniques for photorealistic compositing and
reflectance acquisition techniques which have been used to create realistic
digital actors in films such as "Spider Man 2" and "Superman Returns". I
will then describe initial work with our lab's Light Stage 6 system to
combine image-based relighting with free-viewpoint video to capture and
render full-body performances. I will also describe a new 3D face scanning
process that captures high-resolution skin detail by estimating surface
orientation from the skin's reflection of polarized spherical gradient
illumination. I will conclude by describing a new 3D display that leverages
5,000 frames per second video projection to show autostereoscopic,
interactive 3D imagery to any number of viewers simultaneously.

Speaker: Dr. Paul Debevec, University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies
Paul Debevec is the associate director of graphics research at USC's
Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT) and a research associate
professor at USC's Department of Computer Science. His Ph.D. thesis at UC
Berkeley presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for
creating photoreal virtual camera motion through architectural scenes from
photographs. Using Façade he led the creation of a photoreal animation of
the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film "The Campanile Movie" whose
techniques were later used to create virtual backgrounds for the "The
Matrix"; he went on to demonstrate new image-based lighting techniques in
his animations "Rendering with Natural Light", "Fiat Lux", and "The
Parthenon". He also led the design of HDR Shop, the first widely used high
dynamic range image editing program. Paul received ACM SIGGRAPH's
Significant New Researcher Award in 2001 and co-authored the book "High
Dynamic Range Imaging" in 2005. Most recently, he chaired the SIGGRAPH
2007 Computer Animation Festival.