ENVIDR: Implicit Differentiable Renderer with Neural Environment Lighting

Ruofan Liang, Huiting Chen, Chunlin Li, Fan Chen, Selvakumar Panneer, Nandita Vijaykumar; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 79-89

Recent advances in neural rendering have shown great potential for reconstructing scenes from multiview images. However, accurately representing objects with glossy surfaces remains a challenge for existing methods. In this work, we introduce ENVIDR, a rendering and modeling framework for high-quality rendering and reconstruction of surfaces with challenging specular reflections. To achieve this, we first propose a novel neural renderer with decomposed rendering components to learn the interaction between surface and environment lighting. This renderer is trained using existing physically based renderers and is decoupled from actual scene representations. We then propose an SDF-based neural surface model that leverages this learned neural renderer to represent general scenes. Our model additionally synthesizes indirect illuminations caused by inter-reflections from shiny surfaces by marching surface-reflected rays. We demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-art methods on challenging shiny scenes, providing high-quality rendering of specular reflections while also enabling material editing and scene relighting.