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Goal-Based Caustics

In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics)

We design and mill piece­wise-smooth ar­rays of mi­cro­patches which re­shape in­cid­ent light onto a col­lec­tion of Gaus­si­an caustics, to ap­prox­im­ate ar­bit­rary im­ages at a pro­jec­tion plane. Above, we show a pho­to­graph of a phys­ic­al sample pro­ject­ing the Lena im­age.

Abstract

We pro­pose a nov­el sys­tem for design­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing sur­faces that pro­duce de­sired caustic im­ages when il­lu­min­ated by a light source. Our sys­tem is based on a non­neg­at­ive im­age de­com­pos­i­tion us­ing a set of pos­sibly over­lap­ping an­iso­trop­ic Gaus­si­an ker­nels. We util­ize this de­com­pos­i­tion to con­struct an ar­ray of con­tinu­ous sur­face patches, each of which fo­cuses light onto one of the Gaus­si­an ker­nels, either through re­frac­tion or re­flec­tion. We show how to de­rive the shape of each con­tinu­ous patch and ar­range them by per­form­ing a dis­crete as­sign­ment of patches to ker­nels in the de­sired caustic. Our de­com­pos­i­tion provides for high fi­del­ity re­con­struc­tion of nat­ur­al im­ages us­ing a small col­lec­tion of patches. We demon­strate our ap­proach on a wide vari­ety of caustic im­ages by man­u­fac­tur­ing phys­ic­al sur­faces with a small num­ber of patches.

Se­lec­ted for the Best of EUROGRAPHICS ses­sion at FMX 2011

Video

Text citation

Marios Papas, Wojciech Jarosz, Wenzel Jakob, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Wojciech Matusik, and Tim Weyrich. 2011. Goal-Based Caustics. In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics) 30(2). 503–511.

BibTeX
@article{Papas2011Goal,
    author = {Marios Papas and Wojciech Jarosz and Wenzel Jakob and Szymon Rusinkiewicz and Wojciech Matusik and Tim Weyrich},
    title = {Goal-Based Caustics},
    journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics)},
    volume = {30},
    number = {2},
    pages = {503--511},
    year = {2011},
    month = jun,
    doi = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01876.x}
}