Single-exemplar lighting style transfer via emissive texture synthesis and optimization

Lighting is a key component in how scenes are perceived. However, many interior lighting situations are currently either handcrafted by expert designers, or simply consist of basic regular arrangements of luminaires, such as to reach uniform lighting at a predefined brightness. Our method aims to bring more interesting lighting configurations to various scenes in a semi-automatic manner designed for fast prototyping by non-expert users. Starting from a single photograph of a lighting configuration, we allow users to quickly copy and adapt a lighting style to any 3D scene. Combining image analysis, texture synthesis, and light parameter optimization, we produce a lighting design for the target 3D scene matching the input image. We validate via a user study that our results successfully transfer the desired lighting style more accurately and realistically than state-of-the-art generic style transfer methods. Furthermore, we investigate the behaviour of our method under potential alternative choices in an ablation study.