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Definition
Lambertian reflectance is a scene property that distributes the energy from any incident illumination into all viewing directions equally.
Background
Unlike the general, four-dimensional Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF), Lambertian reflectance has no dependency on viewing direction and is therefore a two-dimensional function. However, this reduction in complexity comes at a cost, since Lambertian reflectance does not account for cast shadows or specularities. This reflectance model is widely used due to both its computational tractability and its fidelity to many scenes, especially when the captured image data is of low resolution. Finally, the Lambertian model is an example of diffuse reflectance, which means it acts as a low-pass filter to incident illumination [1]. An artificial chemical called Spectralon is the real-world material with the closest...
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Koppal, S.J. (2014). Lambertian Reflectance. In: Ikeuchi, K. (eds) Computer Vision. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-31439-6_534
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-31439-6_534
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