We show how to train a fully convolutional neural network to perform inverse rendering from a single, uncontrolled image. The network takes an RGB image as input, regresses albedo and normal maps from which we compute lighting coefficients. Our network is trained using large uncontrolled image collections without ground truth. By incorporating a differentiable renderer, our network can learn from self-supervision. Since the problem is ill-posed we introduce additional supervision: 1. We learn a statistical natural illumination prior, 2. Our key insight is to perform offline multiview stereo (MVS) on images containing rich illumination variation. From the MVS pose and depth maps, we can cross project between overlapping views such that Siamese training can be used to ensure consistent estimation of photometric invariants. MVS depth also provides direct coarse supervision for normal map estimation. We believe this is the first attempt to use MVS supervision for learning inverse rendering.
Classical methods estimate intrinsic properties by fitting photometric or geometric models. Most methods require multiple images. From multiview images, a structure-from-motion multiview stereo pipeline enables recovery of dense mesh models @cite_35 @cite_5 though illumination effects are baked into the texture. From images with fixed viewpoint but varying illumination photometric stereo can be applied. Variants consider statistical BRDF models @cite_55 , the use of outdoor time-lapse images @cite_38 , spatially-varying BRDFs @cite_31 Attempts to combine geometric and photometric methods are limited. Haber al @cite_27 assume known geometry (which can be provided by MVS) and inverse render reflectance and lighting from community photo collections. Kim al @cite_9 represents the state-of-the-art and again uses an MVS initialisation for joint optimisation of geometry, illumination and albedo. Some methods consider a single image setting. Jeson al @cite_42 introduce a local-adaptive reflectance smoothness constraint for intrinsic image decomposition on texture-free input images which are acquired with a texture separation algorithm. Barron al @cite_2 present SIRFS, a classical optimisation-based approach that recovers all of shape, illumination and albedo using a sophisticated combination of generic priors.
@cite_35 @cite_38 @cite_55 @cite_9 @cite_42 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_31
2520013826 2149233602 1996352068 2055686029
3D shape reconstruction with multi-view stereo (MVS) relies on a robust evaluation of photo consistencies across images. The robustness is ensured by isolating surface albedo and scene illumination from the shape recovery, i.e. shading and colour variation are regarded as a nuisance in MVS. This yields a gap in the qualities between the recovered shape and the images used. We present a method to address it by jointly estimating detailed shape, illumination and albedo using the initial shape robustly recovered by MVS. This is achieved by solving the multi-view inverse rendering problem using the geometric and photometric smoothness terms and the normalized spherical harmonics illumination model. Our method allows spatially-varying albedo and per image illumination without any prerequisites such as training data or image segmentation. We demonstrate that our method can clearly improve the 3D shape and recover illumination and albedo on real world scenes. We address the problem of recovering shape, albedo, and illumination from a single grayscale image of an object, using shading as our primary cue. Because this problem is fundamentally underconstrained, we construct statistical models of albedo and shape, and define an optimization problem that searches for the most likely explanation of a single image. We present two priors on albedo which encourage local smoothness and global sparsity, and three priors on shape which encourage flatness, outward-facing orientation at the occluding contour, and local smoothness. We present an optimization technique for using these priors to recover shape, albedo, and a spherical harmonic model of illumination. Our model, which we call SAIFS (shape, albedo, and illumination from shading) produces reasonable results on arbitrary grayscale images taken in the real world, and outperforms all previous grayscale “intrinsic image” — style algorithms on the MIT Intrinsic Images dataset. This paper provides an introduction to photometric methods for image-based 3D shape reconstruction and a survey of photometric stereo techniques. We begin with taxonomy of active and passive shape acquisition techniques. Then we describe the methodical background of photometric 3D reconstruction, define the canonical setting of photometric stereo (Lambertian surface reflectance, parallel incident light, known illumination direction, known surface albedo, absence of cast shadows), discuss the 3D reconstruction of surfaces from local gradients, summarize the concept of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), and outline several important empirically and physically motivated reflectance models. We provide a detailed treatment of several generalizations of the canonical setting of photometric stereo, namely non-distant light sources, unknown illumination directions, and, in some detail, non-Lambertian surface reflectance functions. An important special case is purely specular reflections, where an extended light source allows capturing a surface that consists of perfectly specular surface patches. Linear combinations of purely Lambertian and purely specular reflectance components are favorably used for reconstructing smooth surfaces and also human skin. Nonuniform surface reflectance properties are estimated based on a simultaneous 3D reconstruction and determination of the locally variable parameters of the reflectance function based on a multitude of images. Assuming faceted surfaces, the effective resolution of the 3D reconstruction result can be increased to some extent beyond that of the underlying images. Other approaches separate specular and diffuse reflectance components based on polarization data or color information. The specular reflections can be used additionally to estimate the direction from which the surface is illuminated. Finally, we describe methods to combine photometric 3D reconstruction techniques with active and passive triangulation-based approaches. We propose a probabilistic formulation of joint silhouette extraction and 3D reconstruction given a series of calibrated 2D images. Instead of segmenting each image separately in order to construct a 3D surface consistent with the estimated silhouettes, we compute the most probable 3D shape that gives rise to the observed color information. The probabilistic framework, based on Bayesian inference, enables robust 3D reconstruction by optimally taking into account the contribution of all views. We solve the arising maximum a posteriori shape inference in a globally optimal manner by convex relaxation techniques in a spatially continuous representation. For an interactively provided user input in the form of scribbles specifying foreground and background regions, we build corresponding color distributions as multivariate Gaussians and find a volume occupancy that best fits to this data in a variational sense. Compared to classical methods for silhouette-based multiview reconstruction, the proposed approach does not depend on initialization and enjoys significant resilience to violations of the model assumptions due to background clutter, specular reflections, and camera sensor perturbations. In experiments on several real-world data sets, we show that exploiting a silhouette coherency criterion in a multiview setting allows for dramatic improvements of silhouette quality over independent 2D segmentations without any significant increase of computational efforts. This results in more accurate visual hull estimation, needed by a multitude of image-based modeling approaches. We made use of recent advances in parallel computing with a GPU implementation of the proposed method generating reconstructions on volume grids of more than 20 million voxels in up to 4.41 seconds.