New Techniques for Acquiring, Rendering, and Displaying Human Performances

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.