Inverse Polarization Raytracing: Estimating Surface Shape of Transparent Objects

Abstract

We propose a novel method for estimating the surface shapes of transparent objects by analyzing the polarization state of the light. Existing methods do not fully consider the reflection, refraction, and transmission of the light occurring inside a transparent object. We employ a polarization raytracing method to compute both the path of the light and its polarization state. Our proposed iterative computation method estimates the surface shape of the transparent object by minimizing the difference between the polarization data rendered by the polarization raytracing method and the polarization data obtained from a real object