VT-Intrinsic: Physics-Based Decomposition of Reflectance and Shading using a Single Visible–Thermal Image Pair

Decomposing an image into its underlying photometric factors—surface reflectance and shading—is a long-standing challenge due to the lack of extensive ground-truth data for real-world scenes. We introduce a novel physics-based approach for intrinsic image decomposition using a pair of visible and thermal images. We leverage the principle that light not reflected from an opaque surface is absorbed and detected as heat by a thermal camera. This allows us to relate the ordinalities (or relative magnitudes) between visible and thermal image intensities to the ordinalities of shading and reflectance, which enables a dense self-supervision of an optimizing neural network to recover shading and reflectance. We perform quantitative evaluations with known reflectance and shading under natural and artificial lighting, and qualitative experiments across diverse outdoor scenes. The results demonstrate superior performance over both classical physics-based and recent learning-based methods, providing a path toward scalable real-world data curation with supervision.