Photometric Stereo with General, Unknown Lighting

  • Authors:

  • Ronen Basri;David Jacobs;Ira Kemelmacher

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Applied Math, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel 76100;Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park 20742;Department of Computer Science and Applied Math, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel 76100

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 2007

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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 distant from the object but otherwise unconstrained. Lighting in each image may be an unknown and may include 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. We demonstrate our method by reconstructing the shape of objects from images obtained under a variety of lightings. We further compare the reconstructed shapes against shapes obtained with a laser scanner.