IR-Pro: Baking Probes to Model Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering of Scenes

Abstract

Modeling indirect illumination to handle global illumination and decompose materials from multi-view images is challenging, especially in complex scenes with self-occlusion. While recent implicit neural representations show promise in inverse rendering, they struggle with efficient and effective modeling of indirect illumination. Besides, real-time global illumination techniques (e.g. Indirect Lighting Cache) have been successful in gaming. Inspired by this, we present a novel three-stage Inverse Renderer with Probes (IR-Pro), which efficiently caches occlusion to handle indirect illumination. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of IR-Pro over existing methods in the inverse rendering of complex scenes. Furthermore, we successfully integrate the results into digital content creation software and showcase their effectiveness in applications, like relighting, simulation, and editing.