Solving the Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo Problem using Total Variation

Yvain Quéau (1) , François Lauze (2) , Jean-Denis Durou (3)

1 IRIT-VORTEX - Visual Objects from Reality To Expression
2 UCPH - University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet
3 IRIT-TCI - Traitement et Compréhension d’Images

In this paper we propose a new method to solve the problem of uncalibrated photometric stereo, making very weak assumptions on the properties of the scene to be reconstructed. Our goal is to solve the generalized bas-relief ambiguity (GBR) by performing a total variation regularization of both the estimated normal field and albedo. Unlike most of the previous attempts to solve this ambiguity, our approach does not rely on any prior information about the shape or the albedo, apart from its piecewise smoothness. We test our method on real images and obtain results comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Mots clés: Generalized bas-relief; Uncalibrated photometric stereo; State-of-the-art algorithms

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Yvain Quéau, François Lauze, Jean-Denis Durou. Solving the Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo Problem using Total Variation. International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision - SSVM 2013, Jun 2013, Schloss Seggau, Austria. pp. 270-281. ⟨hal-01143231⟩