A Machine-Learning-Driven Sky Model

IEEE Comput Graph Appl. 2017 Jan-Feb;37(1):80-91. doi: 10.1109/MCG.2016.67. Epub 2016 May 25.

Abstract

Sky illumination is responsible for much of the lighting in a virtual environment. A machine-learning-based approach can compactly represent sky illumination from both existing analytic sky models and from captured environment maps. The proposed approach can approximate the captured lighting at a significantly reduced memory cost and enable smooth transitions of sky lighting to be created from a small set of environment maps captured at discrete times of day. The author's results demonstrate accuracy close to the ground truth for both analytical and capture-based methods. The approach has a low runtime overhead, so it can be used as a generic approach for both offline and real-time applications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't