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