Learning to Detect Specular Highlights from Real-world Images

Specular highlight detection is a challenging problem, and has many applications such as shiny object detection and light source estimation. Although various highlight detection methods have been proposed, they fail to disambiguate bright material surfaces from highlights, and cannot handle non-white-balanced images. Moreover, at present, there is still no benchmark dataset for highlight detection. In this paper, we present a large-scale real-world highlight dataset containing a rich variety of material categories, with diverse highlight shapes and appearances, in which each image is with an annotated ground-truth mask. Based on the dataset, we develop a deep learning-based specular highlight detection network (SHDNet) leveraging multi-scale context contrasted features to accurately detect specular highlights of varying scales. In addition, we design a binary cross-entropy (BCE) loss and an intersection-over-union edge (IoUE) loss for our network. Compared with existing highlight detection methods, our method can accurately detect highlights of different sizes, while effectively excluding the non-highlight regions, such as bright materials, non-specular as well as colored lighting, and even light sources.