Abstract In this paper we extend a multi-camera model for simultaneous estimation of 3d position, normals, and 3d motion of surface patches [17] to be able to handle brightness changes coming from changing illumination. In the target application only surface orientation and 3d motion are of interest. Thus color related surface properties like bidirectional reflectance distribution function do not need to be reconstructed. Consequently we characterize only changes of the brightness using a secondorder power series. We test two new models within a total least squares estimation framework using synthetic data with ground truth available. Motion estimation results improve severely with respect to the brightness constancy model when brightness changes are present in the data.