Light field inference from diffuse shadows

This master thesis will be develop at CSAL-MIT department in the research group of Professor Antonio TorralbaIn this thesis we propose a method to infer light fields from shadows casted over diffuse reflectors. Despite shadows can be seen as projections of a 4D function (i.e.\ the light field) into a lower dimensional space (i.e.a 2D space, for a perfectly diffuse reflector), we prove that we can estimate the original light field considering the geometrical properties of the occluder causing the shadow and prior assumptions on typical light fields. We analyze our inference method for different types of typical occluders, and we test its validity through simulations and real world experiments. Estimating the light field in these or similar scenarios, which happen frequently in practice, provides visual information that may be absent in a single view of the original light field