GaSLight: Gaussian Splats for Spatially-Varying Lighting in HDR

We present GaSLight, a method that generates spatially-varying lighting from regular images. Our method proposes using HDR Gaussian Splats as light source representation, marking the first time regular images can serve as light sources in a 3D renderer. Our two-stage process first enhances the dynamic range of images plausibly and accurately by leveraging the priors embedded in diffusion models. Next, we employ Gaussian Splats to model 3D lighting, achieving spatially variant lighting. Our approach yields state-of-the-art results on HDR estimations and their applications in illuminating virtual objects and scenes. To facilitate the benchmarking of images as light sources, we introduce a novel dataset of calibrated and unsaturated HDR to evaluate images as light sources. We assess our method using a combination of this novel dataset and an existing dataset from the literature. The code to reproduce our method will be available upon acceptance.

Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Temperature Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we present the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range \ang{360} panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color temperature, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks: where per-pixel luminance, per-pixel temperature and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller calibrated dataset with a commercial \ang{360} camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community.