Image Based Material Editing

CGM       |       Technion   -    Israel Institute of Technology

Project Description

Suppose you have a photograph of some object – say a bronze sculpture or a porcelain vase – and you want to know how it would look if it were made out of some completely different material, such as glass, plastic, or wax. Given nothing more than a photograph of the object, is it possible to modify the appearance of the material in a visually plausible way? Photo editing software allows digital images to be blurred, warped or re-colored at the touch of a button. However, it is not currently possible to change the material appearance of an object except by painstakingly painting over the appropriate pixels. This project is based on an article written by Erum Arif Khan, Erik Reinhard, Roland W. Fleming and Heinrich H. Bülthoff that presents a method for automatically replacing one material with another, completely different material, starting with only a single high dynamic range image as input.