Deep Spherical Gaussian Illumination Estimation for Indoor Scene

In this paper, we propose a learning-based method to estimate high dynamic range (HDR) indoor illumination from only a single low dynamic range (LDR) photograph of limited field-of-view. Considering the extreme complexity of indoor illumination that is virtually impossible to reconstruct perfectly, we choose to encode the environmental illumination in Spherical Gaussian (SG) functions with fixed centering directions and bandwidth and only allow the weights vary. An end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed and trained to build the complex relationship between a photograph and its illumination represented by SG functions. Moreover, we employ a masked L2 loss instead of naive L2 loss to avoid the loss of high frequency information, and propose a glossy loss to improve the rendering quality. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts both qualitatively and quantitatively.