# Beyond Visual Attractiveness: Physically Plausible Single Image HDR Reconstruction for Spherical Panoramas

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10130/) (2018)
- [HDR image reconstruction from a single exposure using deep CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07480/) (2017)
- [Learning to Predict Indoor Illumination from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00090/) (2017)
- [Single-Image HDR Reconstruction by Learning to Reverse the Camera Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01179/) (2020)
- [Attention-guided Network for Ghost-free High Dynamic Range Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10293/) (2019)
- [Deep High Dynamic Range Imaging with Large Foreground Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08937/) (2017)
- [ExpandNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for High Dynamic Range Expansion from Low Dynamic Range Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02266/) (2018)
- [Single Image HDR Reconstruction Using a CNN with Masked Features and Perceptual Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07335/) (2020)
- [Deep Sky Modeling for Single Image Outdoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03897/) (2019)
- [DeepLight: Learning Illumination for Unconstrained Mobile Mixed Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01175/) (2019)
- [Deep Outdoor Illumination Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06403/) (2016)
- [Learning High Dynamic Range from Outdoor Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10200/) (2017)
- [Deep Chain HDRI: Reconstructing a High Dynamic Range Image from a Single Low Dynamic Range Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06277/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Text2Light: Zero-Shot Text-Driven HDR Panorama Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09898/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12372/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

HDR reconstruction is an important task in computer vision with many industrial needs. The traditional approaches merge multiple exposure shots to generate HDRs that correspond to the physical quantity of illuminance of the scene. However, the tedious capturing process makes such multi-shot approaches inconvenient in practice. In contrast, recent single-shot methods predict a visually appealing HDR from a single LDR image through deep learning. But it is not clear whether the previously mentioned physical properties would still hold, without training the network to explicitly model them. In this paper, we introduce the physical illuminance constraints to our single-shot HDR reconstruction framework, with a focus on spherical panoramas. By the proposed physical regularization, our method can generate HDRs which are not only visually appealing but also physically plausible. For evaluation, we collect a large dataset of LDR and HDR images with ground truth illuminance measures. Extensive experiments show that our HDR images not only maintain high visual quality but also top all baseline methods in illuminance prediction accuracy.