We present a prototype system for in-situ measurement of per-pixel appearance parameters (i.e., surface orientation, diffuse albedo, specular albedo, and specular roughness) of general scenes. The proposed system requires no specialized hardware, is light weight, and requires no on-site calibration. This makes our system particularly well suited for capturing the appearance of real-world scenes under uncontrolled conditions.

In this article we propose a new framework for capturing light transport data of a real scene, based on the recently developed theory of compressive sensing. Compressive sensing offers a solid mathematical framework to infer a sparse signal from a limited number of nonadaptive measurements. Besides introducing compressive sensing for fast acquisition of light transport to computer graphics, we develop several innovations that address specific challenges for image-based relighting, and which may have broader implications. We develop a novel hierarchical decoding algorithm that improves reconstruction quality by exploiting interpixel coherency relations. Additionally, we design new nonadaptive illumination patterns that minimize measurement noise and further improve reconstruction quality. We illustrate our framework by capturing detailed high-resolution reflectance fields for image-based relighting.