Casual Indoor HDR Radiance Capture from Omnidirectional Images

We present PanoHDR-NeRF, a novel pipeline to casually capture a plausible full HDR radiance field of a large indoor scene without elaborate setups or complex capture protocols. First, a user captures a low dynamic range (LDR) omnidirectional video of the scene by freely waving an off-the-shelf camera around the scene. Then, an LDR2HDR network uplifts the captured LDR frames to HDR, subsequently used to train a tailored NeRF++ model. The resulting PanoHDR-NeRF pipeline can estimate full HDR panoramas from any location of the scene. Through experiments on a novel test dataset of a variety of real scenes with the ground truth HDR radiance captured at locations not seen during training, we show that PanoHDR-NeRF predicts plausible radiance from any scene point. We also show that the HDR images produced by PanoHDR-NeRF can synthesize correct lighting effects, enabling the augmentation of indoor scenes with synthetic objects that are lit correctly.