DISCO - Acquisition of translucent objects

Translucent objects are characterized by diffuse light scattering beneath the object's surface. Light enters and leaves an object at possibly distinct surface locations. This paper presents the first method to acquire this transport behavior for arbitrary inhomogeneous objects. Individual surface points are illuminated in our DISCO measurement facility and the object's impulse response is recorded with a high-dynamic range video camera. The acquired data is resampled into a hierarchical model of the object's light scattering properties. Missing values are consistently interpolated resulting in measurement-based, complete and accurate representations of real translucent objects which can be rendered with various algorithms.