A light stage is an active illumination system used for shape, texture, reflectance and motion capture often with structured light and a multi-camera setup.
The reflectance field over a human face was first captured in 1999 by Paul Debevec, Tim Hawkins et al and presented in SIGGRAPH 2000.
[1] Using this information, a light stage was built by Debevec et al., consisting of Following great scientific success Debevec et al. constructed more elaborate versions of the light stage at the University of Southern California's (USC)'s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT).
Ghosh et al. built the seventh version of the USC light stage X.
In 2014 President Barack Obama had his image and reflectance captured with the USC mobile light stage.