Adversarial Single-Image SVBRDF Estimation with Hybrid Training

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach for estimating the spatially-varying BRDFs (SVBRDF) from a single image. Most existing deep learning techniques use pixel-wise loss functions which limits the flexibility of the networks in handling this highly unconstrained problem. Moreover, since obtaining ground truth SVBRDF parameters is difficult, most methods typically train their networks on synthetic images and, therefore, do not effectively generalize to real examples. To avoid these limitations, we propose an adversarial framework to handle this application. Specifically, we estimate the material properties using an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) and train it through a series of discriminators that distinguish the output of the network from ground truth. To address the gap in data distribution of synthetic and real images, we train our network on both synthetic and real examples. Specifically, we propose a strategy to train our network on pairs of real images of the same object with different lighting. We demonstrate that our approach is able to handle a variety of cases better than the state-of-the-art methods.