From Faces to Outdoor Light Probes
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2018
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
Image-based lighting has allowed the creation of photo-realistic computer-generated content. However, it requires the accurate capture of the illumination conditions, a task neither easy nor intuitive, especially to the average digital photography enthusiast. This paper presents an approach to directly estimate an HDR light probe from a single LDR photograph, shot outdoors with a consumer camera, without specialized calibration targets or equipment. Our insight is to use a person's face as an outdoor light probe. To estimate HDR light probes from LDR faces we use an inverse rendering approach which employs data-driven priors to guide the estimation of realistic, HDR lighting. We build compact, realistic representations of outdoor lighting both parametrically and in a data-driven way, by training a deep convolutional autoencoder on a large dataset of HDR sky environment maps. Our approach can recover high-frequency, extremely high dynamic range lighting environments. For quantitative evaluation of lighting estimation accuracy and relighting accuracy, we also contribute a new database of face photographs with corresponding HDR light probes. We show that relighting objects with HDR light probes estimated by our method yields realistic results in a wide variety of settings.
Description
@article{10.1111:cgf.13341,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{From Faces to Outdoor Light Probes}},
author = {Calian, Dan A. and Lalonde, Jean-François and Gotardo, Paulo and Simon, Tomas and Matthews, Iain and Mitchell, Kenny},
year = {2018},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.13341}
}