Artistic editing for mirage image generation

Abstract

This paper presents an intuitive user interface for generating the rendered image of a mirage. The proposed interface focuses on providing better artistic control over the production of a mirage scene. Our method utilizes two core concepts to do so. The first idea, Source-to-Destination Point Pair, presents an intuitive way to designate the relationship between a source position of an object and its destination position of the mirage effect. The second idea, Parametric Representation of a Scalar Field, enables us to effectively represent a spatial distribution of a refractive index, which physically controls the mirage effect in a compact form. We perform an optimization on this parameter space to find the spatial distribution of the refractive index satisfying the user input. We validate the method visually by comparing whether the resulting image agrees with a goal state given by a user.