BRDF approximation and estimation for Augmented Reality

In Augmented Reality applications it is important to have a good description of the surfaces of real objects if a consistent shading between real and virtual object is required. This thesis emphasizes on this topic as the thesis is a part of the RESHADE1 project whose aim is to deliver a scene of virtual and real objects mixed together where difference is not noticable for the viewer. That means that virtual objects also influence the appearance of the real objects. If such a description of a surface is not available it has to be esti-mated or approximated during runtime. In my bachelor thesis I will present certain methods that deal with real-time bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) approximation in augmented reality. Of course the most impor-tant thing is that the applications I present all work in real-time and compute good (and real) looking results. There are different methods on how to achieve this goal. Most of the methods I am going to present work via image based lighting and require a 3D polygonal mesh representation of the object whose BRDF shall be approximated. Some methods estimate the BRDF parameters via error values and provide results at each iteration