Abstract: A light field parameterized on the surface offers a natural and intuitive description of the view-dependent appearance of scenes with complex reflectance properties. To enable the use of surface light fields in real-time rendering we develop a compact representation suitable for an accelerated graphics pipeline. We propose to approximate the light field data by partitioning it over elementary surface primitives and factorizing each part into a small set of lower-dimensional functions. We show that our representation can be further compressed using standard image compression techniques leading to extremely compact data sets that are up to four orders of magnitude smaller than the input data. Finally, we develop an image-based rendering method, light field mapping, that can visualize surface light fields directly from this compact representation at interactive frame rates on a personal computer. We also implement a new method of approximating the light field data that produces positive only factors allowing for faster rendering using simpler graphics hardware than earlier methods. We demonstrate the results for a variety of non-trivial synthetic scenes and physical objects scanned through 3D photography.