Consensus Photometric Stereo

Abstract

This paper describes a photometric stereo method that works with a wide range of surface reflectances. Unlike previous approaches that assume simple parametric models such as Lambertian reflectance, the only assumption that we make is that the reflectance has three properties; monotonicity, visibility, and isotropy with respect to the cosine of light direction and surface orientation. In fact, these properties are observed in many non-Lambertian diffuse reflectances. We also show that the monotonicity and isotropy properties hold specular lobes with respect to the cosine of the surface orientation and the bisector between the light direction and view direction. Each of these three properties independently gives a possible solution space of the surface orientation. By taking the intersection of the solution spaces, our method determines the surface orientation in a consensus manner. Our method naturally avoids the need for radiometrically calibrating cameras because the radiometric response function preserves these three properties. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using various simulated and real-world scenes that contain a variety of diffuse and specular surfaces.