Department of Pattern Recognition

The Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) is the recent most advanced representation of material surface visual properties. BTF specifies the changes of its visual appearance due to varying illumination and viewing angles. Such a function might be represented by thousands of images of given material surface. Original data cannot be used due to its size and some compression is necessary. This paper presents a novel probabilistic model for BTF textures. The method combines synthesized smooth texture and corresponding range map to produce the required BTF texture. Proposed scheme enables very high BTF texture compression ratio and may be used to reconstruct BTF space as well.

Abstract. The Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) is the recent most advanced representation of visual properties of surface materials. It specifies their altering appearance due to varying illumination and viewing conditions. Corresponding huge BTF measurements require a mathematical representation allowing simultaneously extremal compression as well as high visual fidelity. We present a novel Markovian BTF model based on a set of underlying simultaneous autoregressive models (SAR). This complex but efficient BTF-SAR model combines several multispectral band limited spatial factors and range map sub-models to produce the required BTF texture space. The BTF-SAR model enables very high BTF space compression ratio, texture enlargement, and reconstruction of missing unmeasured parts of the BTF space.