GeoRelight: Learning Joint Geometrical Relighting and Reconstruction with Flexible Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers

arXiv cs.CV / 4/23/2026

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Key Points

  • GeoRelight tackles relighting a person from a single photo by jointly estimating both 3D geometry and illumination-related appearance, addressing ambiguity that entangles geometry, intrinsic appearance, and lighting in 2D images.
  • The method uses a unified Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to avoid limitations of sequential pipelines and improve physical consistency by explicitly incorporating 3D geometry.
  • It introduces isotropic NDC-Orthographic Depth (iNOD), a distortion-free 3D representation designed to be compatible with latent diffusion models.
  • It employs a mixed-data training strategy that combines synthetic data with auto-labeled real data to improve robustness and performance.
  • The paper reports that joint geometry-and-relighting yields better results than both sequential approaches and prior systems that did not leverage geometry explicitly.

Abstract

Relighting a person from a single photo is an attractive but ill-posed task, as a 2D image ambiguously entangles 3D geometry, intrinsic appearance, and illumination. Current methods either use sequential pipelines that suffer from error accumulation, or they do not explicitly leverage 3D geometry during relighting, which limits physical consistency. Since relighting and estimation of 3D geometry are mutually beneficial tasks, we propose a unified Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (DiT) that jointly solves for both: GeoRelight. We make this possible through two key technical contributions: isotropic NDC-Orthographic Depth (iNOD), a distortion-free 3D representation compatible with latent diffusion models; and a strategic mixed-data training method that combines synthetic and auto-labeled real data. By solving geometry and relighting jointly, GeoRelight achieves better performance than both sequential models and previous systems that ignored geometry.