12 research outputs found
Self-Supervised Intrinsic Image Decomposition
Intrinsic decomposition from a single image is a highly challenging task, due
to its inherent ambiguity and the scarcity of training data. In contrast to
traditional fully supervised learning approaches, in this paper we propose
learning intrinsic image decomposition by explaining the input image. Our
model, the Rendered Intrinsics Network (RIN), joins together an image
decomposition pipeline, which predicts reflectance, shape, and lighting
conditions given a single image, with a recombination function, a learned
shading model used to recompose the original input based off of intrinsic image
predictions. Our network can then use unsupervised reconstruction error as an
additional signal to improve its intermediate representations. This allows
large-scale unlabeled data to be useful during training, and also enables
transferring learned knowledge to images of unseen object categories, lighting
conditions, and shapes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method
performs well on both intrinsic image decomposition and knowledge transfer.Comment: NIPS 2017 camera-ready version, project page:
http://rin.csail.mit.edu
Reflectance Hashing for Material Recognition
We introduce a novel method for using reflectance to identify materials.
Reflectance offers a unique signature of the material but is challenging to
measure and use for recognizing materials due to its high-dimensionality. In
this work, one-shot reflectance is captured using a unique optical camera
measuring {\it reflectance disks} where the pixel coordinates correspond to
surface viewing angles. The reflectance has class-specific stucture and angular
gradients computed in this reflectance space reveal the material class.
These reflectance disks encode discriminative information for efficient and
accurate material recognition. We introduce a framework called reflectance
hashing that models the reflectance disks with dictionary learning and binary
hashing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of reflectance hashing for material
recognition with a number of real-world materials
What Is Around The Camera?
How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In
this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a
foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the
environment). Assuming it is not perfectly diffuse, the foreground object acts
as a complexly shaped and far-from-perfect mirror. An additional challenge is
that its appearance confounds the light coming from the environment with the
unknown materials it is made of. We propose a learning-based approach to
predict the environment from multiple reflectance maps that are computed from
approximate surface normals. The proposed method allows us to jointly model the
statistics of environments and material properties. We train our system from
synthesized training data, but demonstrate its applicability to real-world
data. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the information obtained from
objects made out of multiple materials often is complementary and leads to
better performance.Comment: Accepted to ICCV. Project:
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~sgeorgou/multinatillum
A 4D Light-Field Dataset and CNN Architectures for Material Recognition
We introduce a new light-field dataset of materials, and take advantage of
the recent success of deep learning to perform material recognition on the 4D
light-field. Our dataset contains 12 material categories, each with 100 images
taken with a Lytro Illum, from which we extract about 30,000 patches in total.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mid-size dataset for
light-field images. Our main goal is to investigate whether the additional
information in a light-field (such as multiple sub-aperture views and
view-dependent reflectance effects) can aid material recognition. Since
recognition networks have not been trained on 4D images before, we propose and
compare several novel CNN architectures to train on light-field images. In our
experiments, the best performing CNN architecture achieves a 7% boost compared
with 2D image classification (70% to 77%). These results constitute important
baselines that can spur further research in the use of CNNs for light-field
applications. Upon publication, our dataset also enables other novel
applications of light-fields, including object detection, image segmentation
and view interpolation.Comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 201
Radiometric Scene Decomposition: Estimating Complex Re ectance and Natural Illumination from Images
The phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words," is often used to emphasize the wealth of information encoded into an image. While much of this information (e.g., the identities of people in an image, the type and number of objects in an image, etc.) is readily inferred by humans, fully understanding an image is still extremely difficult for computers. One important set of information encoded into images are radiometric scene properties---the properties of a scene related to light. Each pixel in an image indicates the amount of light received by the camera after being reflected, transmitted, or emitted by objects in a scene. It follows that we can learn about the objects of the scene and the scene itself through the image by thinking about the interaction between light and geometry in a scene. The appearance of objects in an image is primarily due to three factors: the geometry of the scene, the reflectance of the surfaces, and the incident illumination of the scene. Recovering these hidden properties of scenes can give us a deep understanding of a scene. For example, the reflectance of a surface can give a hint at the material properties of that surface. In this thesis, we address the question of how to recover complex, spatially-varying reflectance functions and natural illumination in real scenes from one or more images with known or approximately-known geometry. Recovering latent radiometric properties from images is difficult because of the severe underdetermined nature of the problem (i.e., there are many potential combinations of reflectance, light, and geometry that would produce identical input images) combined with the overwhelming dimensionality of the problem. In the real world, reflectance functions are complex, requiring many parameters to accurately model. An important aspect of solving this problem is to create a compact mathematical model to express a wide range of surface reflectance. We must also carefully model scene illumination, which typically exhibits complex behavior as well. Prior work has often simply assumed the light incident to a scene is made up of one or more infinitely-distant point lights. This assumption, however, rarely holds up in practice as not only are scenes illuminated by every possible direction, they are also illuminated by other objects interreflecting one another. To accurately infer reflectance and illumination of real-world scenes, we must account for the real-world behavior of reflectance and illumination. In this work, we develop a mathematical framework for the inference of complex, spatially-varying reflectance and natural illumination in real-world scenes. We use a Bayesian approach, where the radiometric properties (i.e., reflectance and illumination) to be inferred are modeled as random variables. We can then apply statistical priors to model how reflectance and illumination often exist in the real world to help combat the ambiguities created through the image formation process. We use our framework to infer the reflectance and illumination in a variety of scenes, ultimately using it in unrestricted real-world scenes. We show that the framework is capable of recovering complex reflectance and natural illumination in the real world.Ph.D., Computer Science -- Drexel University, 201
Natural Illumination from Multiple Materials Using Deep Learning
Recovering natural illumination from a single Low-Dynamic Range (LDR) image is a challenging task. To remedy this situation we exploit two properties often found in everyday images. First, images rarely show a single material, but rather multiple ones that all reflect the same illumination. However, the appearance of each material is observed only for some surface orientations, not all. Second, parts of the illumination are often directly observed in the background, without being affected by reflection. Typically, this directly observed part of the illumination is even smaller. We propose a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that combines prior knowledge about the statistics of illumination and reflectance with an input that makes explicit use of these two observations. Our approach maps multiple partial LDR material observations represented as reflectance maps and a background image to a spherical High-Dynamic Range (HDR) illumination map. For training and testing we propose a new data set comprising of synthetic and real images with multiple materials observed under the same illumination. Qualitative and quantitative evidence shows how both multi-material and using a background are essential to improve illumination estimations
Towards Scalable Multi-View Reconstruction of Geometry and Materials
In this paper, we propose a novel method for joint recovery of camera pose,
object geometry and spatially-varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution
Function (svBRDF) of 3D scenes that exceed object-scale and hence cannot be
captured with stationary light stages. The input are high-resolution RGB-D
images captured by a mobile, hand-held capture system with point lights for
active illumination. Compared to previous works that jointly estimate geometry
and materials from a hand-held scanner, we formulate this problem using a
single objective function that can be minimized using off-the-shelf
gradient-based solvers. To facilitate scalability to large numbers of
observation views and optimization variables, we introduce a distributed
optimization algorithm that reconstructs 2.5D keyframe-based representations of
the scene. A novel multi-view consistency regularizer effectively synchronizes
neighboring keyframes such that the local optimization results allow for
seamless integration into a globally consistent 3D model. We provide a study on
the importance of each component in our formulation and show that our method
compares favorably to baselines. We further demonstrate that our method
accurately reconstructs various objects and materials and allows for expansion
to spatially larger scenes. We believe that this work represents a significant
step towards making geometry and material estimation from hand-held scanners
scalable
What Is Around the Camera?
How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the environment). Assuming it is not perfectly diffuse, the foreground object acts as a complexly shaped and far-from-perfect mirror An additional challenge is that its appearance confounds the light coming from the environment with the unknown materials it is made of. We propose a learning-based approach to predict the environment from multiple reflectance maps that are computed from approximate surface normals. The proposed method allows us to jointly model the statistics of environments and material properties. We train our system from synthesized training data, but demonstrate its applicability to real-world data. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the information obtained from objects made out of multiple materials often is complementary and leads to better performance