Invisible light: Using infrared for video conference relighting

Desktop video conferencing often suffers from bad lighting, which may be caused by harsh shadowing, saturated regions, etc. The primary reason for this is the lack of control over lighting in the user's environment. A hardware-based solution to this problem would be to place lights near the video camera, but these would be distracting to the user. We use a set of infrared lights placed around the computer monitor to gather a sequence of frames which is used to infer surface normals of the scene. These are used in combination with a visible spectrum image to create an improved relighting result.