RGB2AO: Ambient Occlusion Generation from RGB Images.

We present RGB2AO, a novel task to generate ambient occlusion (AO) from a single RGB image instead of screen space buffers such as depth and normal. RGB2AO produces a new image filter that creates a non-directional shading effect that darkens enclosed and sheltered areas. RGB2AO aims to enhance two 2D image editing applications: image composition and geometry-aware contrast enhancement. We first collect a synthetic dataset consisting of pairs of RGB images and AO maps. Subsequently, we propose a model for RGB2AO by supervised learning of a convolutional neural network (CNN), considering 3D geometry of the input image. Experimental results quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.