Abstract:We propose SIR, an efficient method to decompose differentiable shadows for inverse rendering on indoor scenes using multi-view data, addressing the challenges in accurately decomposing the materials and lighting conditions. Unlike previous methods that struggle with shadow fidelity in complex lighting environments, our approach explicitly learns shadows for enhanced realism in material estimation under unknown light positions. Utilizing posed HDR images as input, SIR employs an SDF-based neural radiance field for comprehensive scene representation. Then, SIR integrates a shadow term with a three-stage material estimation approach to improve SVBRDF quality. Specifically, SIR is designed to learn a differentiable shadow, complemented by BRDF regularization, to optimize inverse rendering accuracy. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world indoor scenes demonstrate the superior performance of SIR over existing methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative analysis. The significant decomposing ability of SIR enables sophisticated editing capabilities like free-view relighting, object insertion, and material replacement. The code and data are available at https://xiaokangwei.github.io/SIR/.