Light and Skin Interactions

Chapter 5. Simulations in Health and Life Sciences

The simulation of light interaction with human skin has been an object of extensive research in many fields for decades. Long before the first local lighting models appeared in the computer graphics literature, detailed biologically based models of light transport in organic tissue were already available in the scientific literature. In fact, most of the models proposed by the computer graphics community were built on modeling techniques developed and employed in those fields. Hence, to fully assess the efforts made by the computer graphics community toward the predictive modeling of skin appearance, it is essential to revisit seminal works that provide the basis for this line of computer graphics ...