Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Temperature Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we present the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range \ang{360} panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color temperature, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks: where per-pixel luminance, per-pixel temperature and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller calibrated dataset with a commercial \ang{360} camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community.