WildRelight: A Real-World Benchmark and Physics-Guided Adaptation for Single-Image Relighting

A real-world relighting dataset of 30 outdoor scenes captured across multiple time steps throughout the day, with paired HDR photographs and HDR environment maps.

30 Scenes 196 HDR Pairs Outdoor Sony α7 + Insta360 Pro2 CC BY 4.0

Download & Links

HuggingFace Dataset Paper (arXiv)

Key Statistics

Property	Value
Scenes	30
Time steps per scene	6–8 (spaced ~1 hour apart)
Total HDR photo/envmap pairs	196
Photo resolution (full)	6048 × 4024 px
Envmap resolution (full)	7680 × 3840 px (equirectangular)
Photo resolution (small)	1200 × ~798 px
Envmap resolution (small)	1200 × 600 px
File format	OpenEXR
HDR normalization	Radiance at reference shutter speed (1/500 – 1/10 s, per scene)

Equipment

Sony α7 Series

Main camera. Captures 3-exposure HDR brackets (RAW DNG). Reference shutter speed varies per scene to ensure proper exposure.

Insta360 Pro2

360° environment map camera. Six-lens equidistant fisheye array, stitched to equirectangular HDR envmap. Placed near the scene center.

Example Scenes

Each panel shows environment maps (top row) paired with aligned HDR photographs (bottom row) across all time steps. Tone-mapped with Reinhard mapping for display.

Garden

6 time steps · 11:35 → 17:15 · LIFE optical flow alignment

Seaside

8 time steps · 19:18 → 21:11 · CV2/SIFT homography alignment

Corridor

6 time steps · 18:16 → 20:35 · LIFE optical flow alignment · GPS available

Statue

6 time steps · 18:26 → 20:28 · LIFE optical flow alignment · GPS available

Dataset Structure

{variant}/{scene}/
├── photo/              # HDR photograph (unaligned)
├── photo_aligned/      # HDR photograph (temporally aligned ← recommended)
├── envmap/             # HDR environment map (unaligned)
└── envmap_aligned/     # HDR environment map (temporally aligned ← recommended)

File naming:
  photo_aligned/    time{N}_hdr.exr       (N = 0, 1, 2, …)
  envmap_aligned/   time{N}_envmap.exr
  meta.json         scene metadata (shooting times, ISO, GPS, …)

Two resolution variants: ori/ (full resolution) and small/ (1200 px). Both photo_aligned/ and envmap_aligned/ are temporally registered to time0 of each scene.

Temporal Alignment

Photos are aligned to time0 of each scene using two methods:

LIFE optical flow (26 scenes) — dense flow-based warping, handles gradual lighting changes and small camera motion.
CV2/SIFT homography (4 scenes: cabin, indoor, sand, seaside) — feature-based homography, used when flow alignment fails.

Environment maps are aligned using phase-correlation-based rotation estimation. Alignment is computed independently for ori and small resolutions.

Citation

If you use WildRelight in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{wang2026wildrelight,
  title     = {WildRelight: A Real-World Benchmark and Physics-Guided Adaptation for Single-Image Relighting},
  author    = {Lezhong Wang and Mehmet Onurcan Kaya and Siavash Bigdeli and Jeppe Revall Frisvad},
  eprint    = {2605.11696},
  year      = {2026},
  primaryClass={cs.CV}, 
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11696}, 
}

License

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.