  Machine learning based Single Image Intrinsic Decomposition (SIID) methods
decompose a captured scene into its albedo and shading images by using the
knowledge of a large set of known and realistic ground truth decompositions.
Collecting and annotating such a dataset is an approach that cannot scale to
sufficient variety and realism. We free ourselves from this limitation by
training on unannotated images.
  Our method leverages the observation that two images of the same scene but
with different lighting provide useful information on their intrinsic
properties: by definition, albedo is invariant to lighting conditions, and
cross-combining the estimated albedo of a first image with the estimated
shading of a second one should lead back to the second one's input image. We
transcribe this relationship into a siamese training scheme for a deep
convolutional neural network that decomposes a single image into albedo and
shading. The siamese setting allows us to introduce a new loss function
including such cross-combinations, and to train solely on (time-lapse) images,
discarding the need for any ground truth annotations.
  As a result, our method has the good properties of i) taking advantage of the
time-varying information of image sequences in the (pre-computed) training
step, ii) not requiring ground truth data to train on, and iii) being able to
decompose single images of unseen scenes at runtime. To demonstrate and
evaluate our work, we additionally propose a new rendered dataset containing
illumination-varying scenes and a set of quantitative metrics to evaluate SIID
algorithms. Despite its unsupervised nature, our results compete with state of
the art methods, including supervised and non data-driven methods.
