Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function

The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) describes how light interacts with a surface, a crucial aspect for realistic image rendering and remote sensing. Current research focuses on efficiently measuring and representing BRDFs, employing techniques like neural networks to learn compact representations from images or textual descriptions, and incorporating them into advanced rendering algorithms such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and Gaussian splatting. These advancements improve the speed and accuracy of BRDF capture and modeling, impacting fields ranging from computer graphics and virtual reality to satellite imagery analysis and 3D modeling.