PhD student, Kevin Karsch, and his team of three others have been working on interesting research at my alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Kevin has published to his personal website. It is a photo editing system that allows you to alter a photo and render a 3d object inserted into the environment with the correct lighting and other details.
We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference. Further, our study shows that our method is competitive with other insertion methods while requiring less scene information. We also collected new illumination and reflectance datasets; renderings produced by our system compare well to ground truth. Our system has applications in the movie and gaming industry, as well as home decorating and user content creation, among others.
You can view the full presentation of the research at Mr. Karsch’s website including additional images and the full publication ( low-res .pdf, high-res available on his site).