A General Pipeline for Dense Illuminant Estimation via Physically Based Synthetic Data
Illuminant estimation is a fundamental problem in computational photography, as it enables the correction of color shifts induced by varying lighting conditions. While learning-based methods have demonstrated strong performance, their progress is hindered by the limited availability of large-scale datasets with accurate illuminant ground-truth. In this work, we propose a general and reusable pipeline to derive dense illuminant chromaticity maps from physically based 3D-rendered scenes. By repurposing an existing 3D scene collection, our approach enables the systematic generation of pixel-wise illuminant annotations under controlled lighting conditions, effectively lowering the barrier to data acquisition for learning-based illuminant estimation. Using this pipeline, we generate a large-scale synthetic set of 74,321 images, which we employ for pre-training both single- and multi-illuminant estimation models. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art architectures show that synthetic pre-training consistently improves performance, with gains of up to 28% for single-illuminant estimation and up to 57% for multi-illuminant estimation, particularly in data-scarce regimes. These findings demonstrate that synthetic data generation pipelines offer an effective and scalable solution for the pre-training of illuminant estimation methods.