Photometric stereo with an arbitrary number of illuminants

We present an optimal generalisation of the 4-light photometric stereo technique for an arbitrary number of Q illuminants. We assume that the surface reflectance can be approximated by the Lambertian model plus a specular reflection. The algorithm works in a recursive manner eliminating the pixel intensities affected by shadows or highlights, based on a least squares error technique, retaining only the information coming from illumination directions that can be used for photometric stereo reconstruction of the normal of the corresponding surface patch. We report results for both simulated and real surfaces and compare them with the results of other state of the art photometric stereo algorithms.

[1]  Katsushi Ikeuchi,et al.  Extracting the Shape and Roughness of Specular Lobe Objects Using Four Light Photometric Stereo , 1996, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  Cheng Lu,et al.  Intrinsic Images by Entropy Minimization , 2004, ECCV.

[3]  Robert J. Woodham,et al.  Photometric Stereo: A Reflectance Map Technique For Determining Surface Orientation From Image Intensity , 1979, Optics & Photonics.

[4]  Bui Tuong Phong.  Illuminat~on for computer generated images , 1973 .

[5]  Athinodoros S. Georghiades,et al.  Incorporating the Torrance and Sparrow model of reflectance in uncalibrated photometric stereo , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[6]  David J. Kriegman,et al.  ShadowCuts: Photometric Stereo with Shadows , 2007, 2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[7]  Bui Tuong Phong.  Illumination for computer generated pictures , 1975, Commun. ACM.

[8]  Maria Petrou,et al.  Design Issues for a Colour Photometric Stereo System , 2005, Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision.

[9]  Jiuai Sun,et al.  Object surface recovery using a multi-light photometric stereo technique for non-Lambertian surfaces subject to shadows and specularities , 2007, Image Vis. Comput..

[10]  Daniel Snow,et al.  Shape and albedo from multiple images using integrability , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[11]  David J. Fleet,et al.  Performance of optical flow techniques , 1994, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[12]  Martin D. Levine,et al.  Removing shadows , 2005, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[13]  Ioannis A. Kakadiaris,et al.  Three-Dimensional Face Recognition in the Presence of Facial Expressions: An Annotated Deformable Model Approach , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[14]  E. North Coleman,et al.  Obtaining 3-dimensional shape of textured and specular surfaces using four-source photometry , 1982, Comput. Graph. Image Process..

[15]  David J. Kriegman,et al.  From Few to Many: Illumination Cone Models for Face Recognition under Variable Lighting and Pose , 2001, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[16]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  Determining shape and reflectance of hybrid surfaces by photometric sampling , 1989, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[17]  Athinodoros S. Georghiades,et al.  Recovering 3-D Shape and Reflectance From a Small Number of Photographs , 2003, Rendering Techniques.

[18]  Edwin R. Hancock,et al.  Estimating Cast Shadows using SFS and Class-based Surface Completion , 2006, 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06).

[19]  Berthold K. P. Horn.  Understanding Image Intensities , 1977, Artif. Intell..

[20]  Maria Petrou,et al.  Shadows and highlights detection in 4-source colour photometric stereo , 2001, Proceedings 2001 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.01CH37205).

[21]  Maria Petrou,et al.  The 4-Source Photometric Stereo Technique for Three-Dimensional Surfaces in the Presence of Highlights and Shadows , 2003, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[22]  Gabriel Taubin,et al.  Appying Shape from Lighting Variation to Bump Map Capture , 1997, Rendering Techniques.

[23]  Rama Chellappa,et al.  A Method for Enforcing Integrability in Shape from Shading Algorithms , 1988, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..