A Polarized Reflection and Material Dataset of Real World Objects

CVPR 2026

Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California

The above link contains sample data. For access to the entire dataset, please contact Jing Yang or Yajie Zhao.

teaser

Overview of our polarized reflection and material dataset. Our Light Stage capture system records real-world objects under controlled lighting, polarization, and multiview conditions. The dataset spans five acquisition dimensions: objects, lighting, polarization, multiview, and material. Each object is captured under 346 One-Light-at-a-Time (OLAT) illuminations and can be synthesized into arbitrary HDRI lighting. Cross and parallel polarization enable reflection separation into diffuse and specular components, from which material attributes such as albedo and normal are derived, resulting in more than 1,200,000 (1.2 million) captured images at 6144×3240 resolution.

Abstract

Accurately modeling how real-world materials reflect light remains a core challenge in inverse rendering, largely due to the scarcity of real measured reflectance data. Existing approaches rely heavily on synthetic datasets with simplified illumination and limited material realism, preventing models from generalizing to real-world images. We introduce a large-scale polarized reflection and material dataset of real-world objects, captured with an 8-camera, 346-light Light Stage equipped with cross/parallel polarization. Our dataset spans 218 everyday objects across five acquisition dimensions — multiview, multi-illumination, polarization, reflectance separation, and material attributes — yielding over 1.2M high-resolution images with diffuse–specular separation and analytically derived diffuse albedo, specular albedo, and surface normals. Using this dataset, we train and evaluate state-of-the-art inverse and forward rendering models on intrinsic decomposition, relighting, and sparse-view 3D reconstruction, demonstrating significant improvements in material separation, illumination fidelity, and geometric consistency. We hope that our work can establish a new foundation for physically grounded material understanding and enable real-world generalization beyond synthetic training regimes.

Video

Overview of the scanned objects

218 everyday objects spanning organic produce, plastics, rubbers, metals, ceramics, glass, fabrics, wood, paper, and other household materials.
Overview of scanned objects

Polarized Reflectance Field Capture Examples

Objects are captured from 8 viewpoints under cross/parallel-polarized OLAT, each with 346 valid lighting directions, enabling diffuse–specular reflection separation.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{yang2026ictpolarreal,
  title     = {A Polarized Reflection and Material Dataset of Real World Objects},
  author    = {Yang, Jing and Dharanikota, Krithika and Jia, Emily and Chen, Haiwei and Zhao, Yajie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  year      = {2026},
}