Papers › DiffusionLight: Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome Ball

DiffusionLight: Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome Ball

14 Dec 2023CVPR 2024 1arXiv:2312.09168archive 2025-07-28

Pakkapon Phongthawee, Worameth Chinchuthakun, Nontaphat Sinsunthithet, Amit Raj, Varun Jampani, Pramook Khungurn, Supasorn Suwajanakorn

We present a simple yet effective technique to estimate lighting in a single input image. Current techniques rely heavily on HDR panorama datasets to train neural networks to regress an input with limited field-of-view to a full environment map. However, these approaches often struggle with real-world, uncontrolled settings due to the limited diversity and size of their datasets. To address this problem, we leverage diffusion models trained on billions of standard images to render a chrome ball into the input image. Despite its simplicity, this task remains challenging: the diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent objects and cannot readily generate images in HDR format. Our research uncovers a surprising relationship between the appearance of chrome balls and the initial diffusion noise map, which we utilize to consistently generate high-quality chrome balls. We further fine-tune an LDR diffusion model (Stable Diffusion XL) with LoRA, enabling it to perform exposure bracketing for HDR light estimation. Our method produces convincing light estimates across diverse settings and demonstrates superior generalization to in-the-wild scenarios.

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DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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2ran · honoured contract
2ran · violated contract
2ran · our draft was wrong

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create_envmap_grid DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight/ball2envmap.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 514c2ce742c55045 · report
get_ball_location DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight/inpaint.py official repository ran · honoured contract MIT (permissive) · ce4effc348048495 · report
get_cartesian_from_spherical DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight/ball2envmap.py official repository ran · violated contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · b643137afa71c998 · report
get_normal_vector DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight/ball2envmap.py official repository ran · violated contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 360bcc2d023ca2dd · report
interpolate_embedding DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight/inpaint.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · b6cfcee4c507bb23 · report
parse_filename DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight/exposure2hdr.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · da6bb4fd0e3ea527 · report

Tasks

DiversityLighting Estimation

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Methods

Diffusion

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