# A Light Stage on Every Desk

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Single Image Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00824/) (2019)
- [SfSNet: Learning Shape, Reflectance and Illuminance of Faces in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01261/) (2017)
- [Learning Physics-guided Face Relighting under Directional Light](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03355/) (2019)
- [Neural Light Transport for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03806/) (2020)
- [Portrait Shadow Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08925/) (2020)
- [Monocular Reconstruction of Neural Face Reflectance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10247/) (2020)
- [Light Stage Super-Resolution: Continuous High-Frequency Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08888/) (2020)
- [Learning Illumination from Diverse Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02396/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning to Relight Portrait Images via a Virtual Light Stage and Synthetic-to-Real Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10510/) (2022)
- [SwitchLight: Co-design of Physics-driven Architecture and Pre-training Framework for Human Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18848/) (2024)
- [LightIt: Illumination Modeling and Control for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10615/) (2024)
- [URAvatar: Universal Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24223/) (2024)
- [LumiNet: Latent Intrinsics Meets Diffusion Models for Indoor Scene Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00177/) (2024)
- [SunStage: Portrait Reconstruction and Relighting using the Sun as a Light Stage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03648/) (2022)
- [ScribbleLight: Single Image Indoor Relighting with Scribbles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17696/) (2024)
- [High-Res Facial Appearance Capture from Polarized Smartphone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01160/) (2022)
- [Learning a 3D Morphable Face Reflectance Model from Low-cost Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11686/) (2023)
- [Latent Intrinsics Emerge from Training to Relight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21074/) (2024)
- [LumiGAN: Unconditional Generation of Relightable 3D Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13153/) (2023)
- [Personalized Video Relighting With an At-Home Light Stage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08843/) (2023)
- [COMPOSE: Comprehensive Portrait Shadow Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13922/) (2024)
- [StyLitGAN: Prompting StyleGAN to Produce New Illumination Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10351/) (2022)
- [Differentiable Display Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13325/) (2023)
- [Refracting Reality: Generating Images with Realistic Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17340/) (2025)
- [Democratizing the Creation of Animatable Facial Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16534/) (2024)
- [Noise-Coded Illumination for Forensic and Photometric Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23002/) (2025)
- [POLAR: A Portrait OLAT Dataset and Generative Framework for Illumination-Aware Face Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13192/) (2025)
- [RelightAnyone: A Generalized Relightable 3D Gaussian Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03357/) (2026)
- [Relightable Gaussian Splatting for Virtual Production Using Image-Based Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09024/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Every time you sit in front of a TV or monitor, your face is actively illuminated by time-varying patterns of light. This paper proposes to use this time-varying illumination for synthetic relighting of your face with any new illumination condition. In doing so, we take inspiration from the light stage work of Debevec et al., who first demonstrated the ability to relight people captured in a controlled lighting environment. Whereas existing light stages require expensive, room-scale spherical capture gantries and exist in only a few labs in the world, we demonstrate how to acquire useful data from a normal TV or desktop monitor. Instead of subjecting the user to uncomfortable rapidly flashing light patterns, we operate on images of the user watching a YouTube video or other standard content. We train a deep network on images plus monitor patterns of a given user and learn to predict images of that user under any target illumination (monitor pattern). Experimental evaluation shows that our method produces realistic relighting results. Video results are available at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/Light_Stage_on_Every_Desk/.