1 research outputs found
From Shading to Local Shape
We develop a framework for extracting a concise representation of the shape
information available from diffuse shading in a small image patch. This
produces a mid-level scene descriptor, comprised of local shape distributions
that are inferred separately at every image patch across multiple scales. The
framework is based on a quadratic representation of local shape that, in the
absence of noise, has guarantees on recovering accurate local shape and
lighting. And when noise is present, the inferred local shape distributions
provide useful shape information without over-committing to any particular
image explanation. These local shape distributions naturally encode the fact
that some smooth diffuse regions are more informative than others, and they
enable efficient and robust reconstruction of object-scale shape. Experimental
results show that this approach to surface reconstruction compares well against
the state-of-art on both synthetic images and captured photographs