Photometric Stereo with General, Unknown Lighting

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 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Ronen Basri, David W. Jacobs
• Keywords: Computer Vision, CVPR 2001, General Lighting Conditions, Order Spherical Harmonics, Photometric Stereo, Shape Ambiguities, Variable Lighting Conditions