cvpr2012_oral

A Closed-Form Solution to Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo via Diffuse Maxima-In this paper we propose a novel solution to uncalibrated

photometric stereo. Our approach is to eliminate the socalled

generalized bas relief (GBR) ambiguity by exploiting

points where the Lambertian reflection is maximal. We

demonstrate several noteworthy properties of these maxima:

1) Closed-form solution: A single diffuse maximum

constrains the GBR ambiguity to a semi-circle in 3D space

2) Efficiency: As few as two diffuse maxima in different images

identify a unique solution　3) GBR-invariance: The

estimation error of the GBR parameters is completely independent

of the true parameters. Furthermore, our algorithm

is remarkably robust: It can obtain an accurate estimate

of the GBR parameters even with extremely high levels of

outliers in the detected maxima (up to 80　of the observations).

The method is validated on real data and achieves

state-of-the-art results.