Phenomenological Roughness Extraction for Physically Based Rendering

Many modern rendering systems use physically based shading techniques, one of which bases its surface property description on the "metalness" and "roughness" of a material. In this work a method for the automatic extraction of the surface roughness parameter from images of an object is developed. The extraction employs polarized light to filter out reflections and uses the difference in reflectivity visible in the images compared to an unpolarized lighting environment to deduce a surface roughness value.