High-Frequency Shape and Albedo from Shading using Natural Image Statistics

We relax the long-held and problematic assumption in shape-from-shading (SFS) that albedo must be uniform or known, and address the problem of “shape and albedo from shading” (SAFS). Using models normally reserved for natural image statistics, we impose “naturalness” priors over the albedo and shape of a scene, which allows us to simultaneously recover the most likely albedo and shape that explain a single image. A simplification of our algorithm solves classic SFS, and our SAFS algorithm can solve the intrinsic image decomposition problem, as it solves a superset of that problem. We present results for SAFS, SFS, and intrinsic image decomposition on real lunar imagery from the Apollo missions, on our own pseudo-synthetic lunar dataset, and on the MIT Intrinsic Images dataset[15]. Our one unified technique appears to outperform the previous best individual algorithms for all three tasks. Our technique allows a coarse observation of shape (from a laser rangefinder or a stere...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Jonathan Barron, Jitendra Malik
• Keywords: Albedo, Computer Vision, CVPR 2011, Intrinsic Image Decomposition, SAFS