Single image intrinsic decomposition without a single intrinsic image

Abstract

Intrinsic image decomposition—decomposing a natural image into a set of images corresponding to different physical causes—is one of the key and fundamental problems of computer vision. Previous intrinsic decomposition approaches either address the problem in a fully supervised manner, or require multiple images of the same scene as input. These approaches are less desirable in practice, as ground truth intrinsic images are extremely difficult to acquire, and requirement of multiple images pose severe limitation on applicable scenarios. In this paper, we propose to bring the best of both worlds. We present a two stream convolutional neural network framework that is capable of learning the decomposition effectively in the absence of any ground truth intrinsic images, and can be easily extended to a (semi-)supervised setup. At inference time, our model can be easily reduced to a single stream module that performs intrinsic decomposition on a single input image. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through extensive experimental study on both synthetic and real-world datasets, showing superior performance over previous approaches in both single-image and multi-image settings. Notably, our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art single image methods while using only 50% of ground truth supervision.