1,037 research outputs found
Variational Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo under General Lighting
Photometric stereo (PS) techniques nowadays remain constrained to an ideal
laboratory setup where modeling and calibration of lighting is amenable. To
eliminate such restrictions, we propose an efficient principled variational
approach to uncalibrated PS under general illumination. To this end, the
Lambertian reflectance model is approximated through a spherical harmonic
expansion, which preserves the spatial invariance of the lighting. The joint
recovery of shape, reflectance and illumination is then formulated as a single
variational problem. There the shape estimation is carried out directly in
terms of the underlying perspective depth map, thus implicitly ensuring
integrability and bypassing the need for a subsequent normal integration. To
tackle the resulting nonconvex problem numerically, we undertake a two-phase
procedure to initialize a balloon-like perspective depth map, followed by a
"lagged" block coordinate descent scheme. The experiments validate efficiency
and robustness of this approach. Across a variety of evaluations, we are able
to reduce the mean angular error consistently by a factor of 2-3 compared to
the state-of-the-art.Comment: Haefner and Ye contributed equall
Photometric stereo for strong specular highlights
Photometric stereo (PS) is a fundamental technique in computer vision known
to produce 3-D shape with high accuracy. The setting of PS is defined by using
several input images of a static scene taken from one and the same camera
position but under varying illumination. The vast majority of studies in this
3-D reconstruction method assume orthographic projection for the camera model.
In addition, they mainly consider the Lambertian reflectance model as the way
that light scatters at surfaces. So, providing reliable PS results from real
world objects still remains a challenging task. We address 3-D reconstruction
by PS using a more realistic set of assumptions combining for the first time
the complete Blinn-Phong reflectance model and perspective projection. To this
end, we will compare two different methods of incorporating the perspective
projection into our model. Experiments are performed on both synthetic and real
world images. Note that our real-world experiments do not benefit from
laboratory conditions. The results show the high potential of our method even
for complex real world applications such as medical endoscopy images which may
include high amounts of specular highlights
Analysis of surface parametrizations for modern photometric stereo modeling
Tridimensional shape recovery based on Photometric Stereo (PS) recently received a strong improvement due to new mathematical models based on partial differential irradiance equation ratios. This modern approach to PS faces more realistic physical effects among which light attenuation and radial light propagation from a point light source. Since the approximation of the surface is performed with single step method, accurate reconstruction is prevented by sensitiveness to noise. In this paper we analyse a well-known parametrization of the tridimensional surface extending it on any auxiliary convex projection functions. Experiments on synthetic data show preliminary results where more accurate reconstruction can be achieved using more suitable parametrization specially in case of noisy input images
Depth Super-Resolution Meets Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo
A novel depth super-resolution approach for RGB-D sensors is presented. It
disambiguates depth super-resolution through high-resolution photometric clues
and, symmetrically, it disambiguates uncalibrated photometric stereo through
low-resolution depth cues. To this end, an RGB-D sequence is acquired from the
same viewing angle, while illuminating the scene from various uncalibrated
directions. This sequence is handled by a variational framework which fits
high-resolution shape and reflectance, as well as lighting, to both the
low-resolution depth measurements and the high-resolution RGB ones. The key
novelty consists in a new PDE-based photometric stereo regularizer which
implicitly ensures surface regularity. This allows to carry out depth
super-resolution in a purely data-driven manner, without the need for any
ad-hoc prior or material calibration. Real-world experiments are carried out
using an out-of-the-box RGB-D sensor and a hand-held LED light source.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop, 201
A single-lobe photometric stereo approach for heterogeneous material
Shape from shading with multiple light sources is an active research area, and a diverse range of approaches have been proposed in recent decades. However, devising a robust reconstruction technique still remains a challenging goal, as the image acquisition process is highly nonlinear. Recent Photometric Stereo variants rely on simplifying assumptions in order to make the problem solvable: light propagation is still commonly assumed to be uniform, and the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function is assumed to be diffuse, with limited interest for specular materials. In this work, we introduce a well-posed formulation based on partial differential equations (PDEs) for a unified reflectance function that can model both diffuse and specular reflections. We base our derivation on ratio of images, which makes the model independent from photometric invariants and yields a well-posed differential problem based on a system of quasi-linear PDEs with discontinuous coefficients. In addition, we directly solve a differential problem for the unknown depth, thus avoiding the intermediate step of approximating the normal field. A variational approach is presented ensuring robustness to noise and outliers (such as black shadows), and this is confirmed with a wide range of experiments on both synthetic and real data, where we compare favorably to the state of the art.Roberto Mecca is a Marie Curie fellow of the “Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica” (Italy) for a project shared with University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering and the Department of Mathematics, University of Bologna
Unifying diffuse and specular reflections for the photometric stereo problem
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WACV.2016.7477643After thirty years of researching, the photometric stereo technique for 3D shape recovery still does not provide reliable results if it is not constrained into very well-controlled scenarios. In fact, dealing with realistic materials and lightings yields a non-linear bidirectional reflectance distribution function which is primarily difficult to parametrize and then arduous to solve. With the aim to let the photometric stereo approach face more realistic assumptions, in this work we firstly introduce a unified irradiance equation describing both diffuse and specular reflection components in a general lighting setting. After that, we define a new equation we call unifying due to its basic features modeling the photometric stereo problem for heterogeneous materials. It is provided by making the ratio of irradiance equations holding both diffuse and specular reflections as well as non-linear light propagation features simultaneously. Performing a wide range of experiments, we show that this new approach overcomes state-of-the-art since it leads to a system of unifying equations which can be solved in a very robust manner using an efficient variational approach.Experimental setups were provided by Toulouse Tech Transfer, and this collaboration was funded by CNRS GdR 2286 (MIA)
Linear Differential Constraints for Photo-polarimetric Height Estimation
In this paper we present a differential approach to photo-polarimetric shape
estimation. We propose several alternative differential constraints based on
polarisation and photometric shading information and show how to express them
in a unified partial differential system. Our method uses the image ratios
technique to combine shading and polarisation information in order to directly
reconstruct surface height, without first computing surface normal vectors.
Moreover, we are able to remove the non-linearities so that the problem reduces
to solving a linear differential problem. We also introduce a new method for
estimating a polarisation image from multichannel data and, finally, we show it
is possible to estimate the illumination directions in a two source setup,
extending the method into an uncalibrated scenario. From a numerical point of
view, we use a least-squares formulation of the discrete version of the
problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to consider a
unified differential approach to solve photo-polarimetric shape estimation
directly for height. Numerical results on synthetic and real-world data confirm
the effectiveness of our proposed method.Comment: To appear at International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV),
Venice, Italy, October 22-29, 201
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