3D representation of ring-shaped lens flares

Develop a 3D representation for ring-shaped lens flares that can reproduce the annular intensity profile not representable by the current Gaussian-based flare model.

Background

The paper’s 2D flare-removal model is trained on procedurally generated ring-shaped flares, but its 3D flare representation uses Gaussian primitives whose opacity peaks at each Gaussian mean and decreases radially outward. Consequently, a single Gaussian cannot reproduce the dark center and annular structure of a ring-shaped flare. The authors identify the 3D representation of such flares as unresolved and explicitly defer it to future work.

References

While our 2D removal model already handles ring-shaped flares (we explicitly include procedurally generated rings in its training set, see #1{sec:datasets}), their 3D representation remains an open problem: because our flare Gaussians have peak opacity at the mean and decrease radially away from it (see~#1{fig:limitations}), a single Gaussian cannot form the annular profile required for rings. We therefore leave the 3D representation of ring-shaped flares for future work.

— Lens Flare Removal and Reconstruction  (2609.39527 - Yenamandra et al., 30 Sep 2026) in Section 6, Future Work; Figure 13 caption