Ring-light photometric stereo

Abstract

We propose a novel algorithm for uncalibrated photometric stereo. While most of previous methods rely on various assumptions on scene properties, we exploit constraints in lighting configurations. We first derive an ambiguous reconstruction by requiring lights to lie on a view centered cone. This reconstruction is upgraded to Euclidean by constraints derived from lights of equal intensity and multiple view geometry. Compared to previous methods, our algorithm deals with more general data and achieves high accuracy. Another advantage of our method is that we can model weak perspective effects of lighting, while previous methods often assume orthographical illumination. We use both synthetic and real data to evaluate our algorithm. We further build a hardware prototype to demonstrate our approach. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.