Intrinsic Scene Properties from a Single RGB-D Image

In this paper we extend the “shape, illumination and reflectance from shading” (SIRFS) model 3, 4, which recovers intrinsic scene properties from a single image. Though SIRFS performs well on images of segmented objects, it performs poorly on images of natural scenes, which contain occlusion and spatially-varying illumination. We therefore present Scene-SIRFS, a generalization of SIRFS in which we have a mixture of shapes and a mixture of illuminations, and those mixture components are embedded in a “soft” segmentation of the input image. We additionally use the noisy depth maps provided by RGB-D sensors (in this case, the Kinect) to improve shape estimation. Our model takes as input a single RGB-D image and produces as output an improved depth map, a set of surface normals, a reflectance image, a shading image, and a spatially varying model of illumination. The output of our model can be used for graphics applications, or for any application involving RGB-D images.