Interactive HDR Environment Map Capturing on Mobile Devices

Real world illumination, captured by digitizing devices, is beneficial to solve many problems in computer graphics. Therefore, practical methods for capturing this illumination are of high interest. In this paper, we present a novel method for capturing environmental illumination by a mobile device. Our method is highly practical as it requires only a consumer mobile phone and the result can be instantly used for rendering or material estimation. We capture the real light in high dynamic range (HDR) to preserve its high contrast. Our method utilizes the moving camera of a mobile phone in auto-exposure mode to reconstruct HDR values. The projection of the image to the spherical environment map is based on the orientation of the mobile device. Both HDR reconstruction and projection run on the mobile GPU to enable interactivity. Moreover, an additional image alignment step is performed. Our results show that the presented method faithfully captures the real environment and that the rendering with our reconstructed environment maps achieves high quality, comparable to reality.