Snapshot Polarimetric Display Inverse Rendering

2026-05-24

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of high-quality inverse rendering in lightweight desktop settings where single-frame observations are inherently limited. The authors propose a novel approach that integrates polarized display with snapshot polarimetric imaging: an LCD projects linearly polarized binary RGB patterns, while an RGB polarization camera equipped with a quarter-wave plate captures spectral-polarimetric measurements in a single shot. A feedforward Transformer network then reconstructs per-pixel surface normals, albedo, roughness, and metallicity. The method innovatively combines polarized display and snapshot polarimetry for inverse rendering and alleviates training data scarcity by expanding limited measured polarimetric BRDF data via generative manifolds. Experiments demonstrate that the approach achieves high-fidelity inverse rendering on a real desktop system, outperforming existing methods across diverse and complex material appearances.

Abstract

Inverse rendering remains a core challenge in graphics and vision, especially in the snapshot configurations required for lightweight desktop workflows, where the per-frame information budget is highly constrained. Previous inverse rendering work explores various available dimensions for enriching the per-shot information, including temporal modulation, spectral encoding, and polarization. In this work, we introduce polarimetric display inverse rendering, using an LCD to project a linearly polarized RGB binary pattern and an RGB polarization camera augmented with a quarter-wave plate to acquire spectro-polarimetric measurements in a single shot. A feed-forward transformer maps these measurements to per-pixel normal, albedo, roughness, and metallicity. To overcome training data scarcity, we expand a limited set of measured polarimetric bidirectional reflectance distribution functions via a generative manifold. Evaluations on a real desktop setup demonstrate accurate inverse rendering across diverse scenes, outperforming existing approaches.

Problem

• inverse rendering
• snapshot
• polarimetric imaging
• lightweight desktop workflow
• information budget

Innovation

• snapshot polarimetric imaging
• inverse rendering
• polarimetric display
• generative manifold
• feed-forward transformer