MAKING NEAR-FIELD PHOTOMETRY PRACTICAL

Luminance field photometry is a near-field photometric technique that uses a CCD-based electronic cam era to measure the four-dimensional fi eld of light surrounding luminaires. Its major disadvantage is that th e amount of raw data produced by the camera measurements can be on the order of hundreds of megabytes. Consequently, luminance field photome try is not yet a practical technique for architectural lighting design . This paper proposes the use of wavelet-based image compression algor ithms that feature lossless data compression, multiresolution image re construction from a serial data stream, and high compression ratios. I t is demonstrated that these particular features are ideally suited to the needs of luminance field photometry, and that wavelet-based image compression algorithms are needed to make luminance field photometry a practical technique.