Highlight-aware two-stream network for single-image SVBRDF acquisition

This paper addresses the task of estimating spatially-varying reflectance (i.e., SVBRDF) from a single, casually captured image. Central to our method is a highlight-aware (HA) convolution operation and a two-stream neural network equipped with proper training losses. Our HA convolution, as a novel variant of standard (ST) convolution, directly modulates convolution kernels under the guidance of automatically learned masks representing potentially overexposed highlight regions. It helps to reduce the impact of strong specular highlights on diffuse components and at the same time, hallucinates plausible contents in saturated regions. Considering that variation of saturated pixels also contains important cues for inferring surface bumpiness and specular components, we design a two-stream network to extract features from two different branches stacked by HA convolutions and ST convolutions, respectively. These two groups of features are further fused in an attention-based manner to facilitate feature selection of each SVBRDF map. The whole network is trained end to end with a new perceptual adversarial loss which is particularly useful for enhancing the texture details. Such a design also allows the recovered material maps to be disentangled. We demonstrate through quantitative analysis and qualitative visualization that the proposed method is effective to recover clear SVBRDFs from a single casually captured image, and performs favorably against state-of-the-arts. Since we impose very few constraints on the capture process, even a non-expert user can create high-quality SVBRDFs that cater to many graphical applications.