The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Given a single outdoor image, we present a method for estimating the likely illumination conditions of the scene. In particular, we compute the probability distribution over the sun position and visibility. The method relies on a combination of weak cues that can be extracted from different portions of the image: the sky, the vertical surfaces, and the ground. While no single cue can reliably estimate illumination by itself, each one can reinforce the others to yield a more robust estimate. This is combined with a data-driven prior computed over a dataset of 6 million Internet photos. We present quantitative results on a webcam dataset with annotated sun positions, as well as qualitative results on consumer- grade photographs downloaded from Internet. Based on the estimated illumination, we show how to realistically insert synthetic 3-D objects into the scene.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Illumination and Imaging Lab and Computer Graphics Lab

Text Reference

Jean-Francois Lalonde, Alexei A. Efros, and Srinivasa G. Narasimhan, "Estimating Natural Illumination from a Single Outdoor Image," IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, October, 2009.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Lalonde_2009_6483,
   author = "Jean-Francois Lalonde and Alexei A. Efros and Srinivasa G Narasimhan",
   title = "Estimating Natural Illumination from a Single Outdoor Image",
   booktitle = "IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision",
   month = "October",
   year = "2009",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu