Recovering Object Surfaces from Viewed Changes in Surface Texture Patterns

This paper explores the reconstruction of object surfaces from viewed changes in surface texture patterns. Our approach differs from those in the past in that instead of simply producing local estimates of the surface orientation, our algorithm recovers complete surfaces. Past approaches (1, 16, 4, 9, 8, 111 only found the surface orientation locally and, therefore, did not take advantage of the surface integrability constraint. Unlike [16, 7, 31, our algorithm does not assume that the surface texture pattern is isotropic; and unlike [l4, 131, our algorithm does not assume that the viewed surface is a t some point fronto-parallel. Furthermore, our algorithm has mechanisms for handling texture boundaries and, consequently, does not produce erratic results in the regions abutting these boundaries. Results on real images are presented demonstrating the potential of our approach.