# StyleLight: HDR Panorama Generation for Lighting Estimation and Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14811/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [StyleRig: Rigging StyleGAN for 3D Control over Portrait Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00121/) (2020)
- [High-Fidelity GAN Inversion for Image Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06590/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Probably Symmetric Deformable 3D Objects from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11130/) (2019)
- [Learning to Predict Indoor Illumination from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00090/) (2017)
- [Single Image Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00824/) (2019)
- [Deep Parametric Indoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08812/) (2019)
- [Fast Spatially-Varying Indoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03799/) (2019)
- [Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11565/) (2019)
- [DeepLight: Learning Illumination for Unconstrained Mobile Mixed Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01175/) (2019)
- [Lighthouse: Predicting Lighting Volumes for Spatially-Coherent Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08367/) (2020)
- [Neural Illumination: Lighting Prediction for Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07370/) (2019)
- [Deep Outdoor Illumination Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06403/) (2016)
- [Enjoy Your Editing: Controllable GANs for Image Editing via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01187/) (2021)
- [EMLight: Lighting Estimation via Spherical Distribution Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11116/) (2020)
- [Intrinsic3D: High-Quality 3D Reconstruction by Joint Appearance and Geometry Optimization with Spatially-Varying Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01670/) (2017)
- [Sparse Needlets for Lighting Estimation with Spherical Transport Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13090/) (2021)
- [Transforming the Latent Space of StyleGAN for Real Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14230/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [DiffusionLight: Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome Ball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09168/) (2023)
- [360DVD: Controllable Panorama Video Generation with 360-Degree Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06578/) (2024)
- [LayerPano3D: Layered 3D Panorama for Hyper-Immersive Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13252/) (2024)
- [Customizing 360-Degree Panoramas through Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18840/) (2023)
- [360-Degree Panorama Generation from Few Unregistered NFoV Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14686/) (2023)
- [LightLab: Controlling Light Sources in Images with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09608/) (2025)
- [EverLight: Indoor-Outdoor Editable HDR Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13207/) (2023)
- [Photorealistic Object Insertion with Diffusion-Guided Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09702/) (2024)
- [Text2Light: Zero-Shot Text-Driven HDR Panorama Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09898/) (2022)
- [PanSplat: 4K Panorama Synthesis with Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12096/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10444/) (2025)
- [DiT360: High-Fidelity Panoramic Image Generation via Hybrid Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11712/) (2025)
- [Edify Image: High-Quality Image Generation with Pixel Space Laplacian Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07126/) (2024)
- [LightSim: Neural Lighting Simulation for Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06654/) (2023)
- [PanoFree: Tuning-Free Holistic Multi-view Image Generation with Cross-view Self-Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02157/) (2024)
- [NeRRF: 3D Reconstruction and View Synthesis for Transparent and Specular Objects with Neural Refractive-Reflective Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13039/) (2023)
- [ZeroComp: Zero-shot Object Compositing from Image Intrinsics via Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08168/) (2024)
- [LuxDiT: Lighting Estimation with Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03680/) (2025)
- [Accidental Light Probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05211/) (2023)
- [What Makes for Text to 360-degree Panorama Generation with Stable Diffusion?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22129/) (2025)
- [Taming Stable Diffusion for Text to 360deg Panorama Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07949/) (2024)
- [DiffusionLight-Turbo: Accelerated Light Probes for Free via Single-Pass Chrome Ball Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01305/) (2025)
- [PANORAMA: The Rise of Omnidirectional Vision in the Embodied AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12989/) (2025)
- [Materialist: Physically Based Editing Using Single-Image Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03717/) (2025)
- [CubeComposer: Spatio-Temporal Autoregressive 4K 360deg Video Generation from Perspective Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04291/) (2026)
- [Traditional Classification Neural Networks are Good Generators: They are Competitive with DDPMs and GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14794/) (2022)
- [GCC: Generative Color Constancy via Diffusing a Color Checker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17435/) (2025)
- [3D Object Manipulation in a Single Image using Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12935/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Posterior Illumination for Ambiguity-aware Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00362/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new lighting estimation and editing framework to generate high-dynamic-range (HDR) indoor panorama lighting from a single limited field-of-view (LFOV) image captured by low-dynamic-range (LDR) cameras. Existing lighting estimation methods either directly regress lighting representation parameters or decompose this problem into LFOV-to-panorama and LDR-to-HDR lighting generation sub-tasks. However, due to the partial observation, the high-dynamic-range lighting, and the intrinsic ambiguity of a scene, lighting estimation remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, we propose a coupled dual-StyleGAN panorama synthesis network (StyleLight) that integrates LDR and HDR panorama synthesis into a unified framework. The LDR and HDR panorama synthesis share a similar generator but have separate discriminators. During inference, given an LDR LFOV image, we propose a focal-masked GAN inversion method to find its latent code by the LDR panorama synthesis branch and then synthesize the HDR panorama by the HDR panorama synthesis branch. StyleLight takes LFOV-to-panorama and LDR-to-HDR lighting generation into a unified framework and thus greatly improves lighting estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on indoor lighting estimation. Notably, StyleLight also enables intuitive lighting editing on indoor HDR panoramas, which is suitable for real-world applications. Code is available at https://style-light.github.io.