On Optimal Light Configurations in Photometric Stereo

Abstract

This paper develops new theory for the optimal placement of photometric stereo lighting in the presence of camera noise. We show that for three lights, any triplet of orthogonal light directions minimises the uncertainty in scaled normal computation. The assumptions are that the camera noise is additive and normally distributed, and uncertainty is defined as the expectation of squared distance of scale normal to the ground truth. If the camera noise is of zero mean and variance sigma <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> the optimal (minimum) uncertainty in the scaled normal is 3sigma <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> For case of n > 3 lights, we show that the minimum uncertainty is 9sigma <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> n, and identify sets of light configurations which reach this theoretical minimum

Cite

Text

Drbohlav and Chantler. "On Optimal Light Configurations in Photometric Stereo." IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2005. doi:10.1109/ICCV.2005.177

Markdown

[Drbohlav and Chantler. "On Optimal Light Configurations in Photometric Stereo." IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2005.](https://mlanthology.org/iccv/2005/drbohlav2005iccv-optimal/) doi:10.1109/ICCV.2005.177

BibTeX

@inproceedings{drbohlav2005iccv-optimal,
  title     = {{On Optimal Light Configurations in Photometric Stereo}},
  author    = {Drbohlav, Ondrej and Chantler, Mike J.},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision},
  year      = {2005},
  pages     = {1707-1712},
  doi       = {10.1109/ICCV.2005.177},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iccv/2005/drbohlav2005iccv-optimal/}
}