Shape Reflectance And Illumination From Appearance

The image formation process describes how light interacts with the objects in a scene and eventually reaches the camera, forming an image that we observe. Inverting this process is a long-standing, ill-posed problem in computer vision, which involves estimating shape, material properties, and/or illumination passively from the object's appearance. Such "inverse rendering" capabilities enable 3D understanding of our world (as desired in autonomous driving, robotics, etc.) and computer graphics applications such as relighting, view synthesis, and object capture (as desired in extended reality [XR], etc.)