PHENOM: Interest Points on Photometric Normal Maps

This paper introduces a novel method for extracting features and matching points on images of texture-less surfaces. Feature points are extracted from surface normal maps recovered by Photometric Stereo. Such sparse matching will help to register high detail 3D surfaces reconstructed from multiple view images. Moreover, the geometric constraints imposed by multiple views can be utilized to correct the geometric ambiguity in photometric reconstruction. Experiments show the performance of proposed interest points in matching texture-less objects. Comparison against texture-based interest points shows that the proposed features based on normal maps perform effectively.