NIMP Normal Image Manipulation Plugin

People

This project is developing a GIMP plugin to filter normals including blur, gaussian blur, difference of gaussians, unsharp-mask and laplacian. It implements the RGBN image filtering method described in this paper by Thiago Pereira and Luiz Velho. RGBN images are photographs with a color and a normal channel. They are very easy to obtain using photometric stereo and can be used to generate very realistic renderings. On the other hand, the normal vectors cannot simply be edited in regular image processing software.

The plugin is currently built on GIMP version XXXX. It makes heavy use of GEGL version YYY to support floating point arithmetic which is very important for proper operations with normal vectors. An alpha version will be available shortly. Future features include operations with layers and painting deformations.



Current Results




The original armor was smoothed (second row) and unsharp-masked (third row).



Lizard scales were obtained with shape from shading and a high pass filter was used to extract the details (second row). Simply using a color laplacian filter would result in a mostly black image instead of the purple color we find.