Towards Learning-based Inverse Subsurface Scattering

Given images of translucent objects, of unknown shape and lighting, we aim to use learning to infer the optical parameters controlling subsurface scattering of light inside the objects. We introduce a new architecture, the inverse transport network (ITN), that aims to improve generalization of an encoder network to unseen scenes, by connecting it with a physically-accurate, differentiable Monte Carlo renderer capable of estimating image derivatives with respect to scattering material parameters. During training, this combination forces the encoder network to predict parameters that not only match groundtruth values, but also reproduce input images. During testing, the encoder network is used alone, without the renderer, to predict material parameters from a single input image. Drawing insights from the physics of radiative transfer, we additionally use material parameterizations that help reduce estimation errors due to ambiguities in the scattering parameter space. Finally, we augment the training loss with pixelwise weight maps that emphasize the parts of the image most informative about the underlying scattering parameters. We demonstrate that this combination allows neural networks to generalize to scenes with completely unseen geometries and illuminations better than traditional networks, with 38.06% reduced parameter error on average.