Photometric stereo for strong specular highlights

TL;DR

This paper advances photometric stereo by integrating the full Blinn-Phong reflectance model with perspective projection, enabling more accurate 3-D shape reconstruction in real-world scenarios with specular highlights.

Contribution

It introduces the first combined use of the Blinn-Phong model and perspective projection in photometric stereo, tested on synthetic and real images including medical endoscopy.

Findings

High accuracy in 3-D reconstruction with complex specular highlights

Effective performance on real-world images without laboratory conditions

Potential applications in medical imaging and other fields

Abstract

Photometric stereo (PS) is a fundamental technique in computer vision known to produce 3-D shape with high accuracy. The setting of PS is defined by using several input images of a static scene taken from one and the same camera position but under varying illumination. The vast majority of studies in this 3-D reconstruction method assume orthographic projection for the camera model. In addition, they mainly consider the Lambertian reflectance model as the way that light scatters at surfaces. So, providing reliable PS results from real world objects still remains a challenging task. We address 3-D reconstruction by PS using a more realistic set of assumptions combining for the first time the complete Blinn-Phong reflectance model and perspective projection. To this end, we will compare two different methods of incorporating the perspective projection into our model. Experiments are performed on both synthetic and real world images. Note that our real-world experiments do not benefit from laboratory conditions. The results show the high potential of our method even for complex real world applications such as medical endoscopy images which may include high amounts of specular highlights.