Evaluation of Illumination in 3D Scenes Based on Heat Maps Comparison

—The issues of assessing the quality of lighting computer 3D scenes using different lighting systems are considered. Quality lighting increases realism, immersion and improves the perception of shape, color and texture of objects in the image. Existing engineering professional lighting calculation programs are not well suited to the design, art solutions or gaming scenes. To obtain objective estimates of illumination, we propose to use metrics for evaluating the quality of rendering systems. Particular attention is paid to the use of such tools as heat maps. Their visual analysis by hue or intensity helps to compare and evaluate the quality of illumination of scenes. However, such a comparison does not give a cumulative score. A possible solution is to treat heat maps as images and use them as the basis for a generalized heat map to produce a single cumulative statistic. In order to create a generalized heat map, several ways of constructing a difference matrix based on normalization methods have been proposed. The proposed approach is implemented as a prototype application. Experiments were carried out on test scenes with different illumination systems. The generalized heat maps made it possible to obtain cumulative estimates of the comparison of different lighting approaches and to identify areas most sensitive to changes in illumination. According to the authors, the proposed approach to illuminance estimation for staged lighting can be used to improve the realism of visualization in 3D modeling.