Photometric
Stereo with General, Unknown Lighting
Abstract. Work on photometric stereo has
shown how to recover the shape and reflectance properties of an object using
multiple images taken with a fixed viewpoint and variable lighting conditions.
This work has primarily relied on known lighting conditions or the presence of a
single point source of light in each image. In this paper we show how to perform
photometric stereo assuming that all lights in a scene are isotropic and distant
from the object but otherwise unconstrained. Lighting in each image may be an
unknown and arbitrary combination of diffuse, point and extended sources. Our
work is based on recent results showing that for Lambertian objects, general
lighting conditions can be represented using low order spherical harmonics.
Using this representation we can recover shape by performing a simple
optimization in a low-dimensional space. We also analyze the shape ambiguities
that arise in such a representation.
Keywords: Photometric Stereo, Lambertian Reflectance, Lorentz
Transformation, Diffuse Lighting.
Five of the 64 images used for
reconstruction, the reconstruction of our algorithm, and blowups of the
reconstruction that reveals the stripes and the logo and writing.
Five of the 11 images used for
reconstruction. Second row: ground truth obtained with a laser scanner (surface,
albedo, and albedo painted surface) and an image taken from roughly the same
view (right). Third row: reconstruction using the 4D method (including shape,
albedo, albedo painted shape and difference from ground truth surface). Bottom
row: reconstruction using the 9D method.
More results in the paper...
IJCV'07 Paper: [PDF]
Photometric Stereo Database: [webpage]
3D laser scans database: [webpage]
Reference:
@article{BasriJacobsKemelmacher_IJCV07,
author = {"Ronen Basri and David Jacobs and Ira Kemelmacher"},
title = {"Photometric Stereo with General, Unknown Lighting."},
journal = {"International Journal of Computer Vision"},
year = {"2007"}
pages = {"239--257"}
volume={"72"}
number={"3"}
}
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