Solving Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo Using Total Variation

Solving the Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo Problem Using Total Variation

In this paper we propose a new method to solve the problem of uncalibrated photometric stereo, making very weak assumptions on the properties of the scene to be reconstructed. Our goal is to solve the generalized bas-relief ambiguity (GBR) by performing a total variation regularization of both the estimated normal field and albedo. Unlike most of the previous attempts to solve this ambiguity, o...

Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo

Lambertian photometric stereo with uncalibrated light directions and intensities determines the surface normals only up to an invertible linear transformation. We show that if object reflectance is a sum of Lambertian and specular terms, the ambiguity reduces into a 2dof group of transformations (compositions of isotropic scaling, rotation around the viewing vector, and change in coordinate fra...

Uncalibrated Near-Light Photometric Stereo

Photometric stereo (PS) [3] is a technique to accurately recover the normal map of a 3D scene from several pictures (at least three) taken from the same view point and under different illumination conditions. When the light directions and intensities are known, photometric stereo can be solved as a linear system. When the illumination is not known, one needs to solve a much harder problem: unca...

Visibility Subspaces: Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo with Shadows

Photometric stereo relies on inverting the image formation process, and doing this accurately requires reasoning about the visibility of light sources with respect to each image point. While simple heuristics for shadow detection suffice in some cases, they are susceptible to error. This paper presents an alternative approach for handling visibility in photometric stereo, one that is suitable f...

Specularities Reduce Ambiguity of Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo