Overview

Image relighting studies how to change the direction, color, intensity, or spatial placement of light in images and scenes without altering their underlying content. Approaches range from diffusion and transformer models conditioned on lighting controls to intrinsic-image decomposition and physics-guided methods that estimate geometry, materials, shadows, and illumination. For 3D and multi-view settings, relightable neural representations such as Gaussian splats aim to keep lighting edits consistent across viewpoints, while video methods also seek temporal stability. A central challenge is closing the gap between synthetic training data and complex real-world lighting while balancing physical accuracy, fine-grained control, and convincing image generation.

Latest papers

34 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, up 67% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Apr 14, 2026

SSD-GS: Scattering and Shadow Decomposition for Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present SSD-GS, a physically-based relighting framework built upon 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that achieves high-quality reconstruction and photorealistic relighting under novel lighting conditions. In physically-based relighting, accurately modeling light-material interactions is essential for faithful appearance reproduction. However, existing 3DGS-based relighting methods adopt coarse shading decompositions, either modeling only diffuse and specular reflections or relying on neural networks to approximate shadows and scattering. This leads to limited fidelity and poor physical interpretability, particularly for anisotropic metals and translucent materials. To address these limitations, SSD-GS decomposes reflectance into four components: diffuse, specular, shadow, and subsurface scattering. We introduce a learnable dipole-based scattering module for subsurface transport, an occlusion-aware shadow formulation that integrates visibility estimates with a refinement network, and an enhanced specular component with an anisotropic Fresnel-based model. Through progressive integration of all components during training, SSD-GS effectively disentangles lighting and material properties, even for unseen illumination conditions, as demonstrated on the challenging OLAT dataset. Experiments demonstrate superior quantitative and perceptual relighting quality compared to prior methods and pave the way for downstream tasks, including controllable light source editing and interactive scene relighting. The source code is available at: https://github.com/irisfreesiri/SSD-GS.
Mar 28, 2026

LightMover: Generative Light Movement with Color and Intensity Controls

We present LightMover, a framework for controllable light manipulation in single images that leverages video diffusion priors to produce physically plausible illumination changes without re-rendering the scene. We formulate light editing as a sequence-to-sequence prediction problem in visual token space: given an image and light-control tokens, the model adjusts light position, color, and intensity together with resulting reflections, shadows, and falloff from a single view. This unified treatment of spatial (movement) and appearance (color, intensity) controls improves both manipulation and illumination understanding. We further introduce an adaptive token-pruning mechanism that preserves spatially informative tokens while compactly encoding non-spatial attributes, reducing control sequence length by 41% while maintaining editing fidelity. To train our framework, we construct a scalable rendering pipeline that generates large numbers of image pairs across varied light positions, colors, and intensities while keeping the scene content consistent with the original image. LightMover enables precise, independent control over light position, color, and intensity, and achieves high PSNR and strong semantic consistency (DINO, CLIP) across different tasks.
Feb 25, 2026

Joint Shadow Generation and Relighting via Light-Geometry Interaction Maps

We propose Light-Geometry Interaction (LGI) maps, a novel representation that encodes light-aware occlusion from monocular depth. Unlike ray tracing, which requires full 3D reconstruction, LGI captures essential light-shadow interactions reliably and accurately, computed from off-the-shelf 2.5D depth map predictions. LGI explicitly ties illumination direction to geometry, providing a physics-inspired prior that constrains generative models. Without such prior, these models often produce floating shadows, inconsistent illumination, and implausible shadow geometry. Building on this representation, we propose a unified pipeline for joint shadow generation and relighting - unlike prior methods that treat them as disjoint tasks - capturing the intrinsic coupling of illumination and shadowing essential for modeling indirect effects. By embedding LGI into a bridge-matching generative backbone, we reduce ambiguity and enforce physically consistent light-shadow reasoning. To enable effective training, we curated the first large-scale benchmark dataset for joint shadow and relighting, covering reflections, transparency, and complex interreflections. Experiments show significant gains in realism and consistency across synthetic and real images. LGI thus bridges geometry-inspired rendering with generative modeling, enabling efficient, physically consistent shadow generation and relighting.
Jan 23, 2026

SyncLight: Single-Edit Multi-View Relighting

We present SyncLight, a method to enable consistent, parametric control over light sources across multiple uncalibrated views of a static scene conditioned on a single view. While single-view relighting has advanced significantly, existing generative approaches struggle to maintain the rigorous lighting consistency essential for multi-camera broadcasts, stereoscopic cinema, and virtual production. SyncLight addresses this by enabling precise control over light intensity and color across a multi-view capture of a scene, conditioned on a single reference edit. Our method leverages a multi-view diffusion transformer trained using a latent bridge matching formulation, achieving high-fidelity relighting of the entire image set in a single inference step. To facilitate training, we introduce a large-scale hybrid dataset comprising diverse synthetic environments -- curated from existing sources and newly designed scenes -- alongside high-fidelity, real-world multi-view captures under calibrated illumination. Though trained only on image pairs, SyncLight generalizes zero-shot to an arbitrary number of viewpoints, effectively propagating lighting changes across all views, without requiring camera pose information. SyncLight enables practical relighting workflows for multi-view capture systems.