PolarAnything: Diffusion-based Polarimetric Image Synthesis

ICCV 2025

1Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications 2Xiong'an Aerospace Information Research Institute 3State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University 4National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peking University

Video

Abstract

Polarization images facilitate image enhancement and 3D reconstruction tasks, but the limited accessibility of polarization cameras hinders their broader application. This gap drives the need for synthesizing photorealistic polarization images. The existing polarization simulator Mitsuba relies on a parametric polarization image formation model and requires extensive 3D assets covering shape and PBR materials, preventing it from generating large-scale photorealistic images. To address this problem, we propose \pa, capable of synthesizing polarization images from a single RGB input with both photorealism and physical accuracy, eliminating the dependency on 3D asset collections. Drawing inspiration from the zero-shot performance of pretrained diffusion models, we introduce a diffusion-based generative framework with an effective representation strategy that preserves the fidelity of polarization properties. Experiments show that our model generates high-quality polarization images and supports downstream tasks like shape from polarization.

BibTeX

@misc{zhang2025polaranythingdiffusionbasedpolarimetricimage,
      title={PolarAnything: Diffusion-based Polarimetric Image Synthesis}, 
      author={Kailong Zhang and Youwei Lyu and Heng Guo and Si Li and Zhanyu Ma and Boxin Shi},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2507.17268},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17268}, 
}