Deep Learning-Based Lighting Estimation for Indoor and Outdoor
Jiwon Lee, Kwanggyoon Seo, Hanui Lee, Jung Eun Yoo, Junyong Noh · Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society · 2021
We propose a deep learning-based method that can estimate an appropriate lighting of both indoor and outdoor images. The method consists of two networks: Crop-to-PanoLDR network and LDR-to-HDR network. The Crop-to-PanoLDR network predicts a low dynamic range (LDR) environment map from a single partially observed normal field of view image, and the LDR-toHDR network transforms the predicted LDR image into a high dynamic range (HDR) environment map which includes the high intensity light information. The HDR environment map generated through this process is applied when rendering virtual objects in the given image. The direction of the estimated light along with ambient light illuminating the virtual object is examined to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. For this, the results from our method are compared with those from the methods that consider either indoor images or outdoor images only. In addition, the effect of the loss function, which plays the role of classifying images into indoor or outdoor was tested and verified. Finally, a user test was conducted to compare the quality of the environment map created in this study with those created by existing research.