Removing the Example from Example-Based Photometric Stereo

Abstract

We introduce an example-based photometric stereo approach that does not require explicit reference objects. Instead, we use a robust multi-view stereo technique to create a partial reconstruction of the scene which serves as scene-intrinsic reference geometry. Similar to the standard approach, we then transfer normals from reconstructed to unreconstructed regions based on robust photometric matching. In contrast to traditional reference objects, the scene-intrinsic reference geometry is neither noise free nor does it necessarily contain all possible normal directions for given materials. We therefore propose several modifications that allow us to reconstruct high quality normal maps. During integration, we combine both normal and positional information yielding high quality reconstructions. We show results on several datasets including an example based on data solely collected from the Internet.