About the Database

Rendering of clean transparent surfaces is well studied in computer graphics. However, transparent objects in the real world almost always have surface contaminants, such as dust (e.g., pollen, skin cells, fabric fibers), dirt (e.g., powder, salt, other minerals, organic materials, soil), and lipids (e.g., fingerprints, lipstick, and other oils). These contaminants usually will both attenuate or occlude the light that passed through and also will scatter light into various directions, which can generate many interesting visual effects and greatly enhance the perception of transparent objects.

Besides modeling the light transport of contamination, it is also very important to consider spatial distribution or "texture" of the contaminant, in order to reproduce photorealistic images. To this end, we have developed methods for measuring the spatial patterns and scattering parameters of a contaminant layer on a thin sheet of glass or plastic. These measurements have been incorporated into a simple interactive tool that uses texture synthesis to generate a contaminant layer of any desired size, with user-selected combinations of contaminant types.

We release both the texture patterns and the measured scattering parameters. Also, the code for the synthesis tool and the code for estimating the scattering prameter from raw images can be downloaded here.

The acquisition and the modeling details of our work can be referred to the following paper: