# Real-time Light Estimation and Neural Soft Shadows for AR Indoor Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01613 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01613/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [Learning to Predict Indoor Illumination from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00090/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [HDR Environment Map Estimation for Real-Time Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10687/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a pipeline for realistic embedding of virtual objects into footage of indoor scenes with focus on real-time AR applications. Our pipeline consists of two main components: A light estimator and a neural soft shadow texture generator. Our light estimation is based on deep neural nets and determines the main light direction, light color, ambient color and an opacity parameter for the shadow texture. Our neural soft shadow method encodes object-based realistic soft shadows as light direction dependent textures in a small MLP. We show that our pipeline can be used to integrate objects into AR scenes in a new level of realism in real-time. Our models are small enough to run on current mobile devices. We achieve runtimes of 9ms for light estimation and 5ms for neural shadows on an iPhone 11 Pro.