  Separating an image into reflectance and shading layers poses a challenge for
learning approaches because no large corpus of precise and realistic ground
truth decompositions exists. The Intrinsic Images in the Wild~(IIW) dataset
provides a sparse set of relative human reflectance judgments, which serves as
a standard benchmark for intrinsic images. A number of methods use IIW to learn
statistical dependencies between the images and their reflectance layer.
Although learning plays an important role for high performance, we show that a
standard signal processing technique achieves performance on par with current
state-of-the-art. We propose a loss function for CNN learning of dense
reflectance predictions. Our results show a simple pixel-wise decision, without
any context or prior knowledge, is sufficient to provide a strong baseline on
IIW. This sets a competitive baseline which only two other approaches surpass.
We then develop a joint bilateral filtering method that implements strong prior
knowledge about reflectance constancy. This filtering operation can be applied
to any intrinsic image algorithm and we improve several previous results
achieving a new state-of-the-art on IIW. Our findings suggest that the effect
of learning-based approaches may have been over-estimated so far. Explicit
prior knowledge is still at least as important to obtain high performance in
intrinsic image decompositions.
