Measuring isotropic subsurface light transport

Subsurface light transport can affect the visual appearance of materials significantly. Measuring and modeling this phenomenon is crucial for accurately reproducing colors in printing or for rendering translucent objects on displays. In this paper, we propose an apparatus to measure subsurface light transport employing a reference material to cancel out adverse signals that may bias the results. In contrast to other approaches, the setup enables improved focusing on rough surfaces (e.g. uncoated paper). We derive a measurement equation that may be used to deduce the point spread function (PSF) of subsurface light transport. Main contributions are the usage of spectrally-narrowband exchangeable LEDs allowing spectrally-resolved measurements and an approach based on quadratic programming for reconstructing PSFs in the case of isotropic light transport.