Measurement and rendering of complex non-diffuse and goniochromatic packaging materials

Abstract

Realistic renderings of materials with complex optical properties, such as goniochromatism and non-diffuse reflection, are difficult to achieve. In the context of the print and packaging industries, accurate visualisation of the complex appearance of such materials is a challenge, both for communication and quality control. In this paper, we characterise the bidirectional reflectance of two homogeneous print samples displaying complex optical properties. We demonstrate that in-plane retro-reflective measurements from a single input photograph, along with genetic algorithm-based BRDF fitting, allow to estimate an optimal set of parameters for reflectance models, to use for rendering. While such a minimal set of measurements enables visually satisfactory renderings of the measured materials, we show that a few additional photographs lead to more accurate results, in particular, for samples with goniochromatic appearance.