Recovery of geometry, natural illumination, and BRDF from a single light field image.

Abstract

We propose an inverse rendering model for light fields to recover surface normals, depth, reflectance, and natural illumination. Our setting is fully uncalibrated, with the reflectance modeled with a spatially constant Blinn-Phong bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) and illumination as an environment map. While previous work makes strong assumptions in this difficult scenario, focusing solely on specific types of objects such as faces or imposing very strong priors, our approach leverages only the light field structure, where a solution consistent across all subaperture views is sought. The optimization is based primarily on shading, which is sensitive to fine geometric details that are propagated to the initial coarse depth map. Despite the problem being inherently ill posed, we achieve encouraging results on synthetic as well as real-world data.