Estimating illumination parameters using spherical harmonics coefficients in frequency space

An algorithm is presented for estimating the direction and strength of point light with the strength of ambient illumination. Existing approaches evaluate these illumination parameters directly in the high dimensional image space, while we estimate the parameters in two steps: first by projecting the image to an orthogonal linear subspace based on spherical harmonic basis functions and then by calculating the parameters in the low dimensional subspace. The test results using the CMU PIE database and Yale Database B show the stability and effectiveness of the method. The resulting illumination information can be used to synthesize more realistic relighting images and to recognize objects under variable illumination.