  Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging, long-standing computer vision
problem for which ground truth data is very difficult to acquire. We explore
the use of synthetic data for training CNN-based intrinsic image decomposition
models, then applying these learned models to real-world images. To that end,
we present \ICG, a new, large-scale dataset of physically-based rendered images
of scenes with full ground truth decompositions. The rendering process we use
is carefully designed to yield high-quality, realistic images, which we find to
be crucial for this problem domain. We also propose a new end-to-end training
method that learns better decompositions by leveraging \ICG, and optionally IIW
and SAW, two recent datasets of sparse annotations on real-world images.
Surprisingly, we find that a decomposition network trained solely on our
synthetic data outperforms the state-of-the-art on both IIW and SAW, and
performance improves even further when IIW and SAW data is added during
training. Our work demonstrates the suprising effectiveness of
carefully-rendered synthetic data for the intrinsic images task.
