  Undoing the image formation process and therefore decomposing appearance into
its intrinsic properties is a challenging task due to the under-constraint
nature of this inverse problem. While significant progress has been made on
inferring shape, materials and illumination from images only, progress in an
unconstrained setting is still limited. We propose a convolutional neural
architecture to estimate reflectance maps of specular materials in natural
lighting conditions. We achieve this in an end-to-end learning formulation that
directly predicts a reflectance map from the image itself. We show how to
improve estimates by facilitating additional supervision in an indirect scheme
that first predicts surface orientation and afterwards predicts the reflectance
map by a learning-based sparse data interpolation.
  In order to analyze performance on this difficult task, we propose a new
challenge of Specular MAterials on SHapes with complex IllumiNation (SMASHINg)
using both synthetic and real images. Furthermore, we show the application of
our method to a range of image-based editing tasks on real images.
