1,865 research outputs found
New constraints on data-closeness and needle map consistency for shape-from-shading
This paper makes two contributions to the problem of needle-map recovery using shape-from-shading. First, we provide a geometric update procedure which allows the image irradiance equation to be satisfied as a hard constraint. This not only improves the data closeness of the recovered needle-map, but also removes the necessity for extensive parameter tuning. Second, we exploit the improved ease of control of the new shape-from-shading process to investigate various types of needle-map consistency constraint. The first set of constraints are based on needle-map smoothness. The second avenue of investigation is to use curvature information to impose topographic constraints. Third, we explore ways in which the needle-map is recovered so as to be consistent with the image gradient field. In each case we explore a variety of robust error measures and consistency weighting schemes that can be used to impose the desired constraints on the recovered needle-map. We provide an experimental assessment of the new shape-from-shading framework on both real world images and synthetic images with known ground truth surface normals. The main conclusion drawn from our analysis is that the data-closeness constraint improves the efficiency of shape-from-shading and that both the topographic and gradient consistency constraints improve the fidelity of the recovered needle-map
Low-level Vision by Consensus in a Spatial Hierarchy of Regions
We introduce a multi-scale framework for low-level vision, where the goal is
estimating physical scene values from image data---such as depth from stereo
image pairs. The framework uses a dense, overlapping set of image regions at
multiple scales and a "local model," such as a slanted-plane model for stereo
disparity, that is expected to be valid piecewise across the visual field.
Estimation is cast as optimization over a dichotomous mixture of variables,
simultaneously determining which regions are inliers with respect to the local
model (binary variables) and the correct co-ordinates in the local model space
for each inlying region (continuous variables). When the regions are organized
into a multi-scale hierarchy, optimization can occur in an efficient and
parallel architecture, where distributed computational units iteratively
perform calculations and share information through sparse connections between
parents and children. The framework performs well on a standard benchmark for
binocular stereo, and it produces a distributional scene representation that is
appropriate for combining with higher-level reasoning and other low-level cues.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2015. Project page:
http://www.ttic.edu/chakrabarti/consensus
Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation
Separating an image into reflectance and shading layers poses a challenge for
learning approaches because no large corpus of precise and realistic ground
truth decompositions exists. The Intrinsic Images in the Wild~(IIW) dataset
provides a sparse set of relative human reflectance judgments, which serves as
a standard benchmark for intrinsic images. A number of methods use IIW to learn
statistical dependencies between the images and their reflectance layer.
Although learning plays an important role for high performance, we show that a
standard signal processing technique achieves performance on par with current
state-of-the-art. We propose a loss function for CNN learning of dense
reflectance predictions. Our results show a simple pixel-wise decision, without
any context or prior knowledge, is sufficient to provide a strong baseline on
IIW. This sets a competitive baseline which only two other approaches surpass.
We then develop a joint bilateral filtering method that implements strong prior
knowledge about reflectance constancy. This filtering operation can be applied
to any intrinsic image algorithm and we improve several previous results
achieving a new state-of-the-art on IIW. Our findings suggest that the effect
of learning-based approaches may have been over-estimated so far. Explicit
prior knowledge is still at least as important to obtain high performance in
intrinsic image decompositions.Comment: CVPR 201
Photometric Depth Super-Resolution
This study explores the use of photometric techniques (shape-from-shading and
uncalibrated photometric stereo) for upsampling the low-resolution depth map
from an RGB-D sensor to the higher resolution of the companion RGB image. A
single-shot variational approach is first put forward, which is effective as
long as the target's reflectance is piecewise-constant. It is then shown that
this dependency upon a specific reflectance model can be relaxed by focusing on
a specific class of objects (e.g., faces), and delegate reflectance estimation
to a deep neural network. A multi-shot strategy based on randomly varying
lighting conditions is eventually discussed. It requires no training or prior
on the reflectance, yet this comes at the price of a dedicated acquisition
setup. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations illustrate the
effectiveness of the proposed methods on synthetic and real-world scenarios.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(T-PAMI), 2019. First three authors contribute equall
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