GroomLight: Hybrid Inverse Rendering for Relightable Human Hair Appearance Modeling

Yang Zheng, Menglei Chai, Delio Vicini, Yuxiao Zhou, Yinghao Xu, Leonidas Guibas, Gordon Wetzstein, Thabo Beeler; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 16040-16050

We present GroomLight, a novel method for relightable hair appearance modeling from multi-view images. Existing hair capture methods struggle to balance photorealistic rendering with relighting capabilities. Analytical material models, while physically grounded, often fail to fully capture appearance details. Conversely, neural rendering approaches excel at view synthesis but generalize poorly to novel lighting conditions. GroomLight addresses this challenge by combining the strengths of both paradigms. It employs an extended hair BSDF model to capture primary light transport and a light-aware residual model to reconstruct the remaining details. We further propose a hybrid inverse rendering pipeline to optimize both components, enabling high-fidelity relighting, view synthesis, and material editing. Extensive evaluations on real-world hair data demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our project website is at: https://syntec-research.github.io/GroomLight.