# PanDORA: Casual HDR Radiance Acquisition of Indoor Scenes for Image-based Lighting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06150/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [Learning to Predict Indoor Illumination from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00090/) (2017)
- [Attention-guided Network for Ghost-free High Dynamic Range Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10293/) (2019)
- [HDR-NeRF: High Dynamic Range Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14451/) (2021)
- [VR-NeRF: High-Fidelity Virtualized Walkable Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02542/) (2023)
- [DiffusionLight: Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome Ball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09168/) (2023)
- [DeepLight: Learning Illumination for Unconstrained Mobile Mixed Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01175/) (2019)
- [HDR-VDP-3: A multi-metric for predicting image differences, quality and contrast distortions in high dynamic range and regular content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13625/) (2023)
- [HDR-Plenoxels: Self-Calibrating High Dynamic Range Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06787/) (2022)
- [Lighting up NeRF via Unsupervised Decomposition and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10664/) (2023)
- [HDR-GS: Efficient High Dynamic Range Novel View Synthesis at 1000x Speed via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15125/) (2024)
- [EverLight: Indoor-Outdoor Editable HDR Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13207/) (2023)
- [OmniGS: Fast Radiance Field Reconstruction using Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03202/) (2024)
- [Luminance Attentive Networks for HDR Image and Panorama Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06688/) (2021)
- [From Chaos to Clarity: 3DGS in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08300/) (2024)
- [Fast High Dynamic Range Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06052/) (2024)
- [Casual Indoor HDR Radiance Capture from Omnidirectional Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07903/) (2022)
- [A Real-time Method for Inserting Virtual Objects into Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05837/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most novel view synthesis methods -- including Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) -- struggle to capture the high dynamic range (HDR) radiance required for realistic image-based lighting (IBL). This limitation stems from a reliance on low dynamic range (LDR) imagery, which fails to capture the intensity of light sources found in indoor environments. While exposure bracketing can recover this range, it is often too slow for practical, large-scale acquisition. In this work, we introduce PanDORA: PANoramic Dual-Observer Radiance Acquisition, a system specifically designed for the fast and affordable capture of high-quality HDR radiance maps for IBL. Our approach utilizes two 360deg cameras mounted on a portable monopod to simultaneously record videos at different exposures. These videos are processed by our proposed two-stage NeRF-based algorithm featuring a novel self-calibrating pipeline to estimate camera parameters. This pipeline produces non-saturated HDR radiance fields that accurately capture the radiance of a scene. When evaluated on a new dataset of real indoor environments featuring HDR ground truth lighting, PanDORA demonstrates superior fidelity in reconstructing the peak intensities necessary for downstream rendering tasks, providing a scalable and efficient solution for capturing real-world IBLs.