ILSH: The Imperial Light-Stage Head Dataset for Human Head View Synthesis

TL;DR

The paper presents the ILSH dataset, a high-resolution light-stage-captured human head dataset designed to advance view synthesis and neural rendering techniques for realistic human avatars.

Contribution

It introduces a new high-quality dataset with detailed capture setup, addressing data collection challenges, and supporting fair evaluation for view synthesis research.

Findings

Dataset includes 1,248 images of 52 subjects

Supports diverse view synthesis and neural rendering approaches

Facilitates fair comparison in view synthesis challenges

Abstract

This paper introduces the Imperial Light-Stage Head (ILSH) dataset, a novel light-stage-captured human head dataset designed to support view synthesis academic challenges for human heads. The ILSH dataset is intended to facilitate diverse approaches, such as scene-specific or generic neural rendering, multiple-view geometry, 3D vision, and computer graphics, to further advance the development of photo-realistic human avatars. This paper details the setup of a light-stage specifically designed to capture high-resolution (4K) human head images and describes the process of addressing challenges (preprocessing, ethical issues) in collecting high-quality data. In addition to the data collection, we address the split of the dataset into train, validation, and test sets. Our goal is to design and support a fair view synthesis challenge task for this novel dataset, such that a similar level of performance can be maintained and expected when using the test set, as when using the validation set. The ILSH dataset consists of 52 subjects captured using 24 cameras with all 82 lighting sources turned on, resulting in a total of 1,248 close-up head images, border masks, and camera pose pairs.