Lighting-by-Example with Wavelets

Automatic lighting design aims to provide users with semi-automated approaches, and easy-to-use tools, to configure lighting for 3D scenes. We present LightOpex the first fully automatic example-based local illumination lighting design system. Utilizing a wavelet-based lighting design framework, by which image quality is modeled using a cognitively inspired objective function, this approach to lighting design both: (1) allows the declarative specification of lighting; and (2) facilitates intuitive and natural specification of scene lighting. LightOpex enables users to select the desired lighting for a scene using exemplar 2D images and uses the spatial distribution of the luminance in these images as the target values of an optimization step. We demonstrate the utility of LightOpex through a range of examples, and conduct a preliminary investigation of the performance of a number of different of optimization schemes.