Analysis of directional reflectance and surface orientation using fresnel theory

Abstract

Polarization of light caused by reflection from dielectric surfaces has been widely studied in computer vision. This paper presents an analysis of the accuracy of a technique that has been developed to acquire surface orientation from the polarization state of diffusely reflected light. This method employs a digital camera and a rotating linear polarizer. The paper also explores the possibility of linking polarization vision with shading information by means of a computationally efficient BRDF estimation algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.