Efficient inverse lighting: A statistical approach

•A fast methodology for the computation of optimal light position in interior rooms•Express lighting intentions based on the mean and variance of the illumination•Avoids the explicit calculation of the overall illumination•Reduce drastically the processing time of inverse lighting problems

Given a scene to illuminate satisfying a specific set of lighting intentions, the inverse lighting techniques allow us to obtain the unknown light source parameters, such as light position or flux emission. This paper introduces a new inverse lighting approach that uses the radiosity mean and variance to define lighting intentions of a scene. It is shown that these statistical parameters can be obtained without the previous calculation of the radiosity of the scene. Avoiding the explicit computation of the illumination of the scene results in a drastic reduction of the time required for the inverse process. This approach also provides a methodology that transforms a current set of lighting intentions into a single lighting intention with statistical parameters. The tests show that the processing time for solving the inverse problem can be reduced to a few seconds in most cases, improving previous work.