Learning Data-Driven Reflectance Priors for Intrinsic Image Decomposition

Tinghui Zhou, Philipp Krahenbuhl, Alexei A. Efros; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 3469-3477

We propose a data-driven approach for intrinsic image decomposition, which is the process of inferring the confounding factors of reflectance and shading in an image. We pose this as a two-stage learning problem. First, we train a model to predict relative reflectance ordering be- tween image patches ('brighter', 'darker', 'same') from large-scale human annotations, producing a data-driven reflectance prior. Second, we show how to naturally integrate this learned prior into existing energy minimization frame- works for intrinsic image decomposition. We compare our method to the state-of-the-art approach of Bell et al. [7] on both decomposition and image relighting tasks, demonstrating the benefits of the simple relative reflectance prior, especially for scenes under challenging lighting conditions.