# Projection Mapping under Environmental Lighting by Replacing Room Lights with Heterogeneous Projectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02547/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [GS-ProCams: Gaussian Splatting-based Projector-Camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11762/) (2024)
- [DPCS: Path Tracing-Based Differentiable Projector-Camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12174/) (2025)
- [Shadowless Projection Mapping for Tabletop Workspaces with Synthetic Aperture Projector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11551/) (2026)
- [ProCap: Projection-Aware Captioning for Spatial Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00912/) (2026)
- [Setup-Independent Full Projector Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01736/) (2026)
- [FF-ProCams: Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting for Projector-Camera System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Projection mapping (PM) is a technique that enhances the appearance of real-world surfaces using projected images, enabling multiple people to view augmentations simultaneously, thereby facilitating communication and collaboration. However, PM typically requires a dark environment to achieve high-quality projections, limiting its practicality. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by replacing conventional room lighting with heterogeneous projectors. These projectors replicate environmental lighting by selectively illuminating the scene, excluding the projection target. Our contributions include a distributed projector optimization framework designed to effectively replicate environmental lighting and the incorporation of a large-aperture projector, in addition to standard projectors, to reduce high-luminance emitted rays and hard shadows -- undesirable factors for collaborative tasks in PM. We conducted a series of quantitative and qualitative experiments, including user studies, to validate our approach. Our findings demonstrate that our projector-based lighting system significantly enhances the contrast and realism of PM results even under environmental lighting compared to typical lights. Furthermore, our method facilitates a substantial shift in the perceived color mode from the undesirable aperture-color mode, where observers perceive the projected object as self-luminous, to the surface-color mode in PM.