The paper starts with a review of integration techniques for calculating height maps from dense gradient fields. There exist a few proposals of local integration methods (Coleman/Jain 1982, Healey/Jain 1984, Wu/Li 1988, Rodehorst 1993), and two proposals for global optimization (Horn/Brooks 1986 and Frankot/ Chellappa 1988). Several experimental evaluations of such integration techniques are di...