@article{li2017modeling, author = {Li, Xiao and Dong, Yue and Peers, Pieter and Tong, Xin}, title = {Modeling Surface Appearance from a Single Photograph using Self-augmented Convolutional Neural Networks}, year = {2017}, month = {July}, abstract = {We present a convolutional neural network (CNN) based solution for modeling physically plausible spatially varying surface reflectance functions (SVBRDF) from a single photograph of a planar material sample under unknown natural illumination. Gathering a sufficiently large set of labeled training pairs consisting of photographs of SVBRDF samples and corresponding reflectance parameters, is a difficult and arduous process. To reduce the amount of required labeled training data, we propose to leverage the appearance information embedded in unlabeled images of spatially varying materials to self-augment the training process. Starting from a coarse network obtained from a small set of labeled training pairs, we estimate provisional model parameters for each unlabeled training exemplar. Given this provisional reflectance estimate, we then synthesize a novel temporary labeled training pair by rendering the exact corresponding image under a new lighting condition. After refining the network using these additional training samples, we re-estimate the provisional model parameters for the unlabeled data and repeat the self-augmentation process until convergence. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed network structure on spatially varying wood, metal, and plastics, as well as thoroughly validate the effectiveness of the self-augmentation training process.}, publisher = {ACM}, url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/modeling-surface-appearance-single-photograph-using-self-augmented-convolutional-neural-networks/}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics}, edition = {ACM Transactions on Graphics}, }