Accidental Light Probes

Abstract

Recovering lighting in a scene from a single image is a fundamental problem in computer vision. While a mirror ball light probe can capture omnidirectional lighting, light probes are generally unavailable in everyday images. In this work, we study recovering lighting from accidental light probes (ALPs)-common, shiny objects like Coke cans, which often accidentally appear in daily scenes. We propose a physically-based approach to model ALPs and estimate lighting from their appearances in single images. The main idea is to model the appearance of ALPs by photogram-metrically principled shading and to invert this process via differentiable rendering to recover incidental illumination. We demonstrate that we can put an ALP into a scene to allow high-fidelity lighting estimation. Our model can also recover lighting for existing images that happen to contain an ALP**Project website: https://kovenyu.com/ALP. I'd rather be Shiny. - Tamatoa from Moana, 2016