Shape and Model from Specular Motion

This work investigates visual characteristics of specular surfaces during rotation, and gives approaches to qualitatively identify and quantitatively recover shapes of these surfaces. Continuous images are taken when an object rotates. We look at specularly reflected patterns on the surfaces and their motion in the EPIs parallel to the rotation plane, from which estimation of each surface point and construction of the object model are carried out. We find very simple and direct methods to fulfill this objective; linear equations for multiple lights illumination, and a lstorder differential equation for single light illumination. The motion of specular rellection has nice global characteristics in EPI. The surface types range from very shiny metal surfaces to surfaces with only week specular reflectance. We give both simulation and experiments on real objects.