Lighting Estimation in Augmented Reality
In augmented reality (AR) it is often desirable for virtual objects to be blended into their real world surroundings indistinguishable from real objects to the user. However current AR setups face many challenges and virtual objects are often displayed with static lighting rather than adjusting to the environment’s actual lighting conditions. For this project we will infer lighting conditions from the environment to allow 3-D objects to be realistically represented in AR in real time. In a larger context this contributes to computer vision and graphics techniques useful to autonomous vehicles for inferring information about the environment as well as many other emerging technologies outside of AR.

I found the computational photography and computer graphics courses fascinating and am now exploring these subjects further through SuperUROP. Getting to contribute research in these fields especially in the context of augmented reality for my project is quite exciting.