Estimation of Arbitrary Albedo and Shape from Shading for Symmetric Objects

In this paper, we propose a shape from shading (SFS) approach to recover both the shape and the reflectance properties of symmetric objects using a single image. The common constraint of constant or piece-wise constant albedo for lambertJan surfaces is relaxed to arbitrary albedo. The proposed method can be categorized as a linear shape from shading method, which linearizes the reflectance function for symmetric objects using the symmetry cues of the shape and the albedo, and iteratively computes the depth values. Estimated depth values are then used to recover pixel-wise surface albedo. To show the usefulness of the proposed method, we present experimental results for both synthetic and real images