PS-FCN: A Flexible Learning Framework for Photometric Stereo

This paper addresses the problem of photometric stereo for non-Lambertian surfaces. Existing approaches often adopt simplified reflectance models to make the problem more tractable, but this greatly hinders their applications on real-world objects. In this paper, we propose a deep fully convolutional network, called PS-FCN, that takes an arbitrary number of images of a static object captured under different light directions with a fixed camera as input, and predicts a normal map of the object in a fast feed-forward pass. Unlike the recently proposed learning based method, PS-FCN does not require a pre-defined set of light directions during training and testing, and can handle multiple images and light directions in an order-agnostic manner. Although we train PS-FCN on synthetic data, it can generalize well on real datasets. We further show that PS-FCN can be easily extended to handle the problem of uncalibrated photometric stereo.Extensive experiments on public real datasets show that PS-FCN outperforms existing approaches in calibrated photometric stereo, and promising results are achieved in uncalibrated scenario, clearly demonstrating its effectiveness.Comment: ECCV 2018: https://guanyingc.github.io/PS-FC

Photometric stereo for 3D face reconstruction using non-linear illumination models

Face recognition in presence of illumination changes, variant pose and different facial expressions is a challenging problem. In this paper, a method for 3D face reconstruction using photometric stereo and without knowing the illumination directions and facial expression is proposed in order to achieve improvement in face recognition. A dimensionality reduction method was introduced to represent the face deformations due to illumination variations and self shadows in a lower space. The obtained mapping function was used to determine the illumination direction of each input image and that direction was used to apply photometric stereo. Experiments with faces were performed in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. From the experiments it was shown that the proposed approach results very accurate 3D surfaces without knowing the light directions and with a very small differences compared to the case of known directions. As a result the proposed approach is more general and requires less restrictions enabling 3D face recognition methods to operate with less data

PS-FCN: a flexible learning framework for photometric stereo

This paper addresses the problem of photometric stereo for non-Lambertian surfaces. Existing approaches often adopt simplified reflectance models to make the problem more tractable, but this greatly hinders their applications on real-world objects. In this paper, we propose a deep fully convolutional network, called PS-FCN, that takes an arbitrary number of images of a static object captured under different light directions with a fixed camera as input, and predicts a normal map of the object in a fast feed-forward pass. Unlike the recently proposed learning based method, PS-FCN does not require a pre-defined set of light directions during training and testing, and can handle multiple images and light directions in an order-agnostic manner. Although we train PS-FCN on synthetic data, it can generalize well on real datasets. We further show that PS-FCN can be easily extended to handle the problem of uncalibrated photometric stereo. Extensive experiments on public real datasets show that PS-FCN outperforms existing approaches in calibrated photometric stereo, and promising results are achieved in uncalibrated scenario, clearly demonstrating its effectiveness