Interactive Relighting in Single Low-Dynamic Range Images

This article addresses the relighting of outdoor and large indoor scenes illuminated by nondistant lights, which has seldom been discussed in previous works. We propose a method for users to interactively edit the illumination of a scene by moving existing lights and inserting synthetic lights into the scene that requires only a small amount of user annotation and a single low-dynamic range (LDR) image. We achieve this by adopting a top-down approach that estimates the scene reflectance by fitting a diffuse illumination model to a photograph. This approach gains stability and robustness by estimating the camera, scene geometry, and light sources in sequence and by using a confidence map, which is a per-pixel weight map. The results of our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method can estimate a scene accurately enough for realistic relighting of images. Moreover, the experimental results of our user studies show that the synthesized images are so realistic as to be almost indistinguishable from real photographs.