HD-RTI: An adaptive multi-light imaging approach for the quality assessment of manufactured surfaces

Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is a technique for estimating surface local angular reflectance from a set of stereo-photometric images captured with variable lighting directions. The digitization of this information fully fits into the industry 4.0 approach and makes it possible to characterize the visual properties of a surface. The proposed method, namely HD-RTI, is based on the coupling of RTI and HDR imaging techniques. This coupling is carried out adaptively according to the response at each angle of illumination. The proposed method is applied to five industrial samples which have high local variations of reflectivity because of their heterogeneity of geometric texture and/or material. Results show that coupling HDR and RTI improves the relighting quality compared to RTI, and makes the proposed approach particularly relevant for glossy and heterogeneous surfaces. Moreover, HD-RTI enhances significantly the characterization of the local angular reflectance, which leads to more discriminating visual saliency maps, and more generally to an increase in robustness for visual quality assessment tasks. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.