29,104 research outputs found
Terrain analysis using radar shape-from-shading
This paper develops a maximum a posteriori (MAP) probability estimation framework for shape-from-shading (SFS) from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The aim is to use this method to reconstruct surface topography from a single radar image of relatively complex terrain. Our MAP framework makes explicit how the recovery of local surface orientation depends on the whereabouts of terrain edge features and the available radar reflectance information. To apply the resulting process to real world radar data, we require probabilistic models for the appearance of terrain features and the relationship between the orientation of surface normals and the radar reflectance. We show that the SAR data can be modeled using a Rayleigh-Bessel distribution and use this distribution to develop a maximum likelihood algorithm for detecting and labeling terrain edge features. Moreover, we show how robust statistics can be used to estimate the characteristic parameters of this distribution. We also develop an empirical model for the SAR reflectance function. Using the reflectance model, we perform Lambertian correction so that a conventional SFS algorithm can be applied to the radar data. The initial surface normal direction is constrained to point in the direction of the nearest ridge or ravine feature. Each surface normal must fall within a conical envelope whose axis is in the direction of the radar illuminant. The extent of the envelope depends on the corrected radar reflectance and the variance of the radar signal statistics. We explore various ways of smoothing the field of surface normals using robust statistics. Finally, we show how to reconstruct the terrain surface from the smoothed field of surface normal vectors. The proposed algorithm is applied to various SAR data sets containing relatively complex terrain structure
Analysis and approximation of some Shape-from-Shading models for non-Lambertian surfaces
The reconstruction of a 3D object or a scene is a classical inverse problem
in Computer Vision. In the case of a single image this is called the
Shape-from-Shading (SfS) problem and it is known to be ill-posed even in a
simplified version like the vertical light source case. A huge number of works
deals with the orthographic SfS problem based on the Lambertian reflectance
model, the most common and simplest model which leads to an eikonal type
equation when the light source is on the vertical axis. In this paper we want
to study non-Lambertian models since they are more realistic and suitable
whenever one has to deal with different kind of surfaces, rough or specular. We
will present a unified mathematical formulation of some popular orthographic
non-Lambertian models, considering vertical and oblique light directions as
well as different viewer positions. These models lead to more complex
stationary nonlinear partial differential equations of Hamilton-Jacobi type
which can be regarded as the generalization of the classical eikonal equation
corresponding to the Lambertian case. However, all the equations corresponding
to the models considered here (Oren-Nayar and Phong) have a similar structure
so we can look for weak solutions to this class in the viscosity solution
framework. Via this unified approach, we are able to develop a semi-Lagrangian
approximation scheme for the Oren-Nayar and the Phong model and to prove a
general convergence result. Numerical simulations on synthetic and real images
will illustrate the effectiveness of this approach and the main features of the
scheme, also comparing the results with previous results in the literature.Comment: Accepted version to Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 57
page
Shape-from-shading using the heat equation
This paper offers two new directions to shape-from-shading, namely the use of the heat equation to smooth the field of surface normals and the recovery of surface height using a low-dimensional embedding. Turning our attention to the first of these contributions, we pose the problem of surface normal recovery as that of solving the steady state heat equation subject to the hard constraint that Lambert's law is satisfied. We perform our analysis on a plane perpendicular to the light source direction, where the z component of the surface normal is equal to the normalized image brightness. The x - y or azimuthal component of the surface normal is found by computing the gradient of a scalar field that evolves with time subject to the heat equation. We solve the heat equation for the scalar potential and, hence, recover the azimuthal component of the surface normal from the average image brightness, making use of a simple finite difference method. The second contribution is to pose the problem of recovering the surface height function as that of embedding the field of surface normals on a manifold so as to preserve the pattern of surface height differences and the lattice footprint of the surface normals. We experiment with the resulting method on a variety of real-world image data, where it produces qualitatively good reconstructed surfaces
Shape reconstruction from gradient data
We present a novel method for reconstructing the shape of an object from
measured gradient data. A certain class of optical sensors does not measure the
shape of an object, but its local slope. These sensors display several
advantages, including high information efficiency, sensitivity, and robustness.
For many applications, however, it is necessary to acquire the shape, which
must be calculated from the slopes by numerical integration. Existing
integration techniques show drawbacks that render them unusable in many cases.
Our method is based on approximation employing radial basis functions. It can
be applied to irregularly sampled, noisy, and incomplete data, and it
reconstructs surfaces both locally and globally with high accuracy.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, zip-file, submitted to Applied Optic
A graph-spectral approach to shape-from-shading
In this paper, we explore how graph-spectral methods can be used to develop a new shape-from-shading algorithm. We characterize the field of surface normals using a weight matrix whose elements are computed from the sectional curvature between different image locations and penalize large changes in surface normal direction. Modeling the blocks of the weight matrix as distinct surface patches, we use a graph seriation method to find a surface integration path that maximizes the sum of curvature-dependent weights and that can be used for the purposes of height reconstruction. To smooth the reconstructed surface, we fit quadrics to the height data for each patch. The smoothed surface normal directions are updated ensuring compliance with Lambert's law. The processes of height recovery and surface normal adjustment are interleaved and iterated until a stable surface is obtained. We provide results on synthetic and real-world imagery
An approximation scheme for an Eikonal Equation with discontinuous coefficient
We consider the stationary Hamilton-Jacobi equation where the dynamics can
vanish at some points, the cost function is strictly positive and is allowed to
be discontinuous. More precisely, we consider special class of discontinuities
for which the notion of viscosity solution is well-suited. We propose a
semi-Lagrangian scheme for the numerical approximation of the viscosity
solution in the sense of Ishii and we study its properties. We also prove an
a-priori error estimate for the scheme in an integral norm. The last section
contains some applications to control and image processing problems
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