Andy Lin

Introduction

It is extremely useful to render 3D scenes and be able to feed the radiance information of these scenes into camera simulation software such as ISET [CITATION: ISET]. Synthesizing scenes allows for the control over scene attributes that we could be difficult to obtain when working with real world scenes. For example, scene synthesis allows for the control over foreground objects, backgrounds, texture and lighting. Most importantly, the depth information is very easy to obtain, in contrast to the complicated depth estimation algorithms for real-world scenes.

Often times, people criticize synthesized scenes and say that they are not realistic enough. However, with enough effort and precision, highly realistic scenes can be regenerated. See Figure 1 for examples of synthesized scenes with the Radiance software [CITATION: Radiance].

Moreover, if these rendered scenes can be fed into a camera simulation software such as ISET, then we could simulate photographs of these artificial scenes. Moreover, the additional 3D information allows for renderings of advanced photography attributes that have not been simulated extensively before in a well-controlled synthesized environment. For example, the 3D information allows for the simulation of multiple camera systems, proper lens depth-of-field simulation, synthetic aperture, flutter shutter, and even light-fields cameras.

For this project, I used the RenderToolBox software tool, provided by David Brainard [CITATION: Brainard] to synthesize example 3D scenes. The radiance of these scenes, along with the depth map were then fed into the ISET simulation environment for a simulated camera capture of the scene.

Methods

In order to use RenderToolBox, a deeper understanding of its architecture is required. RenderToolBox is actually a wrapper software tool of several other simulation software. In particular, Radiance, PsychToolBox, PBRT (what does this stand for?), and SimToolBox are used to help render an artificial scene. The most important software tool that RenderToolBox is built on, is Radiance, which is a scene rendering tool which contains a ray tracer.

Radiance