System and method for exploring light spaces

摘要

A system and method for creating lighting for an image generates a large number of images based upon randomly selected light positions, types and directions. The images are then culled to reduce the number of images to be reviewed by a user. The images are culled to provide a set of images which best spans the lighting space represented by the large number of images. The culling process is iterative; at each iteration, the image which is most dissimilar from a nearest neighbor in the selected set is added to the selected set. The images are organized in a hierarchical structure to ease review by the user. The hierarchical structure separates the images into multiple levels. At each level, the images are separated into sets of equal size. Each set includes images which are most similar. An average image from each set is picked as the visual representation for that set. In creating the hierarchical structure, a single image may or may not be included in different subsets. A user interface allows the user to review and select images in the hierarchical structure. The images selected by the user are combined to create a final image with lighting. The lighting specifications can be saved for future reference by the lighting system or other applications.