Look Who it Was Random video

Single Photo Estimation of Hair Appearance

96 views · Published 2 March 2016 · 3:45 · Indexed 7 October 2026

Channel: Nicolas Bonneel · 2016 · Music

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Published at EGSR 2009
N. Bonneel, S. Paris, M. van de Panne, F. Durand, G. Drettakis

Abstract:
Significant progress has been made in high-quality hair rendering, but it remains difficult to choose parameter
values that reproduce a given real hair appearance. In particular, for applications such as games where naive
users want to create their own avatars, tuning complex parameters is not practical. Our approach analyses a
single flash photograph and estimates model parameters that reproduce the visual likeness of the observed hair.
The estimated parameters include color absorptions, three reflectance lobe parameters of a multiple-scattering
rendering model, and a geometric noise parameter. We use a novel melanin-based model to capture the natural
subspace of hair absorption parameters. At its core, the method assumes that images of hair with similar color
distributions are also similar in appearance. This allows us to recast the issue as an image retrieval problem
where the photo is matched with a dataset of rendered images; we thus also match the model parameters used
to generate these images. An earth-mover’s distance is used between luminance-weighted color distributions to
gauge similarity. We conduct a perceptual experiment to evaluate this metric in the context of hair appearance
and demonstrate the method on 64 photographs, showing that it can achieve a visual likeness for a large variety
of input photos.

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