Precomputed Radiance Transfer for Reflectance and Lighting Estimation

Decomposing scenes into reflectance and lighting is an important task for applications such as relighting, image matching or content creation. Advanced light transport effects like occlusion and indirect lighting are often ignored, leading to subpar decompositions in which the albedo needs to compensate for insufficiencies in the estimated shading. We show how to account for these advanced lighting effects by utilizing precomputed radiance transfer to estimate reflectance and lighting. Given the geometry of an object and one or multiple images, our method reconstructs the object’s surface reflectance properties—such as its albedo and glossiness—as well as a colored lighting environment map. Evaluation on synthetic and real data shows that incorporation of indirect light leads to qualitatively and quantitatively improved results.