Research on AI dynamic light and shadow effect design based on image processing in virtual reality environment

The traditional light and shadow design method has the problems of high computational complexity and poor real-time performance, and it is difficult to meet the requirements of virtual reality (VR) environment. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic lighting effect design system based on image processing and AI. Its architecture includes data acquisition, image recognition and analysis, lighting modeling and prediction, real-time adjustment strategy and user interaction interface. The image quality is improved by multi-scale feature fusion preprocessing technology, and the improved ResNet-18 architecture is used to classify materials. The improved Phong-BRDF model and lightweight LSTM network are combined to realize real-time optimization of light and shadow effects. The experimental results show that the PSNR and SSIM indexes of this method are significantly better than the traditional methods in complex dynamic lighting scenes, and the frame rate reduction is less than 7%, and it has obvious advantages in metal material reflection performance and dynamic adjustment response ability. The user's subjective evaluation results show that this method is significantly better than the traditional method in realism, fluency and immersion.