Illumination Browser: An intuitive representation for radiance map databases

Radiance maps (RM) are used for capturing the lighting properties of real-world environments. Databases of RMs are useful for various rendering applications such as look development, live action composition, mixed reality, and machine learning. Such databases are not useful if they cannot be organized in a meaningful way. To address this, we introduce the illumination space, a feature space that arranges RM databases based on illumination properties. Our method is motivated by how the RM illuminates the scene as opposed to describing the textural content of the RM. We avoid manual labeling by automatically extracting features from an RM that provides a concise and semantically meaningful representation of its typical lighting effects. We also introduce 'Illumination Browser', a user interface (UI) that visualizes the illumination space alongside a real-time preview renderer to enable intuitive browsing for artists. This is made possible with the following contributions: a method to automatically extract a small set of dominant and ambient lighting properties from RMs, a low-dimensional (5D) light feature vector summarizing these properties to form the illumination space, and a UI that effectively utilizes the illumination space.(C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.