  How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In
this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a
foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the
environment). Assuming it is not perfectly diffuse, the foreground object acts
as a complexly shaped and far-from-perfect mirror. An additional challenge is
that its appearance confounds the light coming from the environment with the
unknown materials it is made of. We propose a learning-based approach to
predict the environment from multiple reflectance maps that are computed from
approximate surface normals. The proposed method allows us to jointly model the
statistics of environments and material properties. We train our system from
synthesized training data, but demonstrate its applicability to real-world
data. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the information obtained from
objects made out of multiple materials often is complementary and leads to
better performance.
