The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The aim of photometric stereo is to estimate shape and appearance of a three-dimensional object from multiple input images taken from the same point of view but under different lighting conditions. The most common techniques are conceptually close to the classic photometric stereo problem, meaning that the modelling encompasses a linearisation step and that the shape information is computed in terms of surface normals. Instead of linearising we aim to stick to the original formulation of the photometric stereo problem, and we propose to minimise a much more natural objective function, namely the reprojection error in terms of depth. Minimising the resulting non-trivial variational model for photometric stereo allows to recover the depth of the photographed scene directly. At hand of an experimental evaluation we discuss important properties of the method.