We describe a unified representation of occluders in light transport and photography using shield fields: the 4D attenuation function which acts on any light field incident on an occluder. Our key theoretical result is that shield fields can be used to decouple the effects of occluders and incident illumination. We first describe the properties of shield fields in the frequency-domain and briefly analyze the "forward" problem of efficiently computing cast shadows. Afterwards, we apply the shield field signal-processing framework to make several new observations regarding the "inverse" problem of reconstructing 3D occluders from cast shadows
Douglas Lanman, Ramesh Raskar, Amit K. Agrawal, Ga