Snapshot Polarimetric Display Inverse Rendering
It enables practical, lightweight inverse rendering for desktop workflows by leveraging polarization to increase per-shot information, addressing the bottleneck of constrained information in snapshot configurations.
This work introduces a snapshot inverse rendering method using polarimetric displays and a polarization camera to recover per-pixel surface properties (normal, albedo, roughness, metallicity) from a single shot. The method outperforms existing approaches on a real desktop setup.
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.