IllumiNeRF: 3D Relighting without Inverse Rendering
Authors: name: Xiaoming Zhao, name: Pratul P. Srinivasan, name: Dor Verbin, name: Keunhong Park, name: Ricardo Martin Brualla, name: Philipp Henzler

Existing methods for relightable view synthesis -- using a set of images of
an object under unknown lighting to recover a 3D representation that can be
rendered from novel viewpoints under a target illumination -- are based on
inverse rendering, and attempt to disentangle the object geometry, materials,
and lighting that explain the input images. Furthermore, this typically
involves optimization through differentiable Monte Carlo rendering, which is
brittle and computationally-expensive. In this work, we propose a simpler
approach: we first relight each input image using an image diffusion model
conditioned on lighting and then reconstruct a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)
with these relit images, from which we render novel views under the target
lighting. We demonstrate that this strategy is surprisingly competitive and
achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple relighting benchmarks. Please see
our project page at https://illuminerf.github.io/.