The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
On the relationship between radiance and irradiance: determining the illumination from images of a convex Lambertian object
Abstract
We present a theoretical analysis of the relationship between incoming radiance and irradiance. Specifically, we address the question of whether it is possible to compute the incident radiance from knowledge of the irradiance at all surface orientations. This is a fundamental question in computer vision and inverse radiative transfer. We show that the irradiance can be viewed as a simple convolution of the incident illumination, i.e., radiance and a clamped cosine transfer function. Estimating the radiance can then be seen as a deconvolution operation. We derive a simple closed-form formula for the irradiance in terms of spherical harmonic coefficients of the incident illumination and demonstrate that the odd-order modes of the lighting with order greater than 1 are completely annihilated. Therefore these components cannot be estimated from the irradiance, contradicting a theorem that is due to Preisendorfer. A practical realization of the radiance-from-irradiance problem is the estimation of the lighting from images of a homogeneous convex curved Lambertian surface of known geometry under distant illumination, since a Lambertian object reflects light equally in all directions proportional to the irradiance. We briefly discuss practical and physical considerations and describe a simple experimental test to verify our theoretical results.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(2020) · Electromagnetic Processes · doi:10.2307/j.ctv131bv37.5 · Cited by 21,966
Levoy, M., & Hanrahan, P. (1996) · Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques · doi:10.1145/237170.237199 · Cited by 3,755
Self-citationGortler, S. J., Grzeszczuk, R., Szeliski, R., & Cohen, M. F. (1996) · Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques · doi:10.1145/237170.237200 · Cited by 2,458
Group Theory and its Applications
(1971) · Elsevier eBooks · doi:10.1016/c2013-0-11100-2 · Cited by 639
What Is the Set of Images of an Object Under All Possible Illumination Conditions?
Belhumeur, P. N., & Kriegman, D. J. (1998) · International Journal of Computer Vision · doi:10.1023/a:1008005721484 · Cited by 525
Gershun, A. A. (1939) · Studies in Applied Mathematics · doi:10.1002/sapm193918151 · Cited by 440
Surface light fields for 3D photography
Wood, D. N., Azuma, D. I., Aldinger, K., Curless, B., Duchamp, T., Salesin, D. H., & Stuetzle, W. (2000) · Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '00 · doi:10.1145/344779.344925 · Cited by 430
Group Theory and Its Applications in Physics
Inui, T., Tanabe, Y., & Onodera, Y. (1990) · Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-80021-4 · Cited by 398
Lambertian reflectance and linear subspaces
Basri, R., & Jacobs, D. (2002) · Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2001 · doi:10.1109/iccv.2001.937651 · Cited by 277
Introduction to radiometry and photometry
(2012) · Digital Video and HD · doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-391926-7.50054-0 · Cited by 262
Cited by
PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields
Yu, A., Li, R., Tancik, M., Li, H., Ng, R., & Kanazawa, A. (2021) · 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) · doi:10.1109/iccv48922.2021.00570 · Cited by 854
An efficient representation for irradiance environment maps
Ramamoorthi, R., & Hanrahan, P. (2001) · Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques · doi:10.1145/383259.383317 · Cited by 769
Self-citationA signal-processing framework for inverse rendering
Ramamoorthi, R., & Hanrahan, P. (2001) · Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques · doi:10.1145/383259.383271 · Cited by 577
Self-citationTotal variation models for variable lighting face recognition
Chen, T., Yin, W., Zhou, X. S., Comaniciu, D., & Huang, T. S. (2006) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2006.195 · Cited by 437
3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image Using a Single Reference Face Shape
Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I., & Basri, R. (2011) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2010.63 · Cited by 428
Metadata
- Authors
- Ramamoorthi, R., & Hanrahan, P.
- Venue
- Journal of the Optical Society of America A
- Publisher
- Optica Publishing Group
- Published
- 2001-10-01
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 2448
- ISSN
- 1084-7529 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-8532
- OpenAlex
- W2170464076
- Cited by
- 377
- References
- 15
- FWCI
- 27.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: On the relationship between radiance and irradiance: determining the illumination from images of a convex Lambertian object. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1364/josaa.18.002448
- The paper
- Ramamoorthi, R., & Hanrahan, P. (2001). On the relationship between radiance and irradiance: determining the illumination from images of a convex Lambertian object. Journal of the Optical Society of America A. https://doi.org/10.1364/josaa.18.002448
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.