No Arabic abstract
We present a neural network that predicts HDR outdoor illumination from a single LDR image. At the heart of our work is a method to accurately learn HDR lighting from LDR panoramas under any weather condition. We achieve this by training another CNN (on a combination of synthetic and real images) to take as input an LDR panorama, and regress the parameters of the Lalonde-Matthews outdoor illumination model. This model is trained such that it a) reconstructs the appearance of the sky, and b) renders the appearance of objects lit by this illumination. We use this network to label a large-scale dataset of LDR panoramas with lighting parameters and use them to train our single image outdoor lighting estimation network. We demonstrate, via extensive experiments, that both our panorama and single image networks outperform the state of the art, and unlike prior work, are able to handle weather conditions ranging from fully sunny to overcast skies.
We propose a data-driven learned sky model, which we use for outdoor lighting estimation from a single image. As no large-scale dataset of images and their corresponding ground truth illumination is readily available, we use complementary datasets to train our approach, combining the vast diversity of illumination conditions of SUN360 with the radiometrically calibrated and physically accurate Laval HDR sky database. Our key contribution is to provide a holistic view of both lighting modeling and estimation, solving both problems end-to-end. From a test image, our method can directly estimate an HDR environment map of the lighting without relying on analytical lighting models. We demonstrate the versatility and expressivity of our learned sky model and show that it can be used to recover plausible illumination, leading to visually pleasant virtual object insertions. To further evaluate our method, we capture a dataset of HDR 360{deg} panoramas and show through extensive validation that we significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art.
We present SOLID-Net, a neural network for spatially-varying outdoor lighting estimation from a single outdoor image for any 2D pixel location. Previous work has used a unified sky environment map to represent outdoor lighting. Instead, we generate spatially-varying local lighting environment maps by combining global sky environment map with warped image information according to geometric information estimated from intrinsics. As no outdoor dataset with image and local lighting ground truth is readily available, we introduce the SOLID-Img dataset with physically-based rendered images and their corresponding intrinsic and lighting information. We train a deep neural network to regress intrinsic cues with physically-based constraints and use them to conduct global and local lightings estimation. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that SOLID-Net significantly outperforms previous methods.
We present a CNN-based technique to estimate high-dynamic range outdoor illumination from a single low dynamic range image. To train the CNN, we leverage a large dataset of outdoor panoramas. We fit a low-dimensional physically-based outdoor illumination model to the skies in these panoramas giving us a compact set of parameters (including sun position, atmospheric conditions, and camera parameters). We extract limited field-of-view images from the panoramas, and train a CNN with this large set of input image--output lighting parameter pairs. Given a test image, this network can be used to infer illumination parameters that can, in turn, be used to reconstruct an outdoor illumination environment map. We demonstrate that our approach allows the recovery of plausible illumination conditions and enables photorealistic virtual object insertion from a single image. An extensive evaluation on both the panorama dataset and captured HDR environment maps shows that our technique significantly outperforms previous solutions to this problem.
We present a method to estimate lighting from a single image of an indoor scene. Previous work has used an environment map representation that does not account for the localized nature of indoor lighting. Instead, we represent lighting as a set of discrete 3D lights with geometric and photometric parameters. We train a deep neural network to regress these parameters from a single image, on a dataset of environment maps annotated with depth. We propose a differentiable layer to convert these parameters to an environment map to compute our loss; this bypasses the challenge of establishing correspondences between estimated and ground truth lights. We demonstrate, via quantitative and qualitative evaluations, that our representation and training scheme lead to more accurate results compared to previous work, while allowing for more realistic 3D object compositing with spatially-varying lighting.
We tackle the problem of estimating flow between two images with large lighting variations. Recent learning-based flow estimation frameworks have shown remarkable performance on image pairs with small displacement and constant illuminations, but cannot work well on cases with large viewpoint change and lighting variations because of the lack of pixel-wise flow annotations for such cases. We observe that via the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques, one can easily estimate relative camera poses between image pairs with large viewpoint change and lighting variations. We propose a novel weakly supervised framework LIFE to train a neural network for estimating accurate lighting-invariant flows between image pairs. Sparse correspondences are conventionally established via feature matching with descriptors encoding local image contents. However, local image contents are inevitably ambiguous and error-prone during the cross-image feature matching process, which hinders downstream tasks. We propose to guide feature matching with the flows predicted by LIFE, which addresses the ambiguous matching by utilizing abundant context information in the image pairs. We show that LIFE outperforms previous flow learning frameworks by large margins in challenging scenarios, consistently improves feature matching, and benefits downstream tasks.