Auto-calibrating photometric stereo using ring light constraints

Abstract

We propose an auto-calibration method for photometric stereo. Our method exploits constraints placed on light sources to recover their positions and the surface normals of an object up to a scaling and planar rotation ambiguity. The ambiguity is resolved with multi-view consistency constraints leading to a Euclidean reconstruction of the geometric shape of the object. Auto-calibration methods are helpful to overcome the limitations imposed by calibrating objects. We evaluate our algorithm with experiments on real world scenes. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.