Pay attention to devils: A photometric stereo network for better details

Abstract

We present an attention-weighted loss in a photometric stereo neural network to improve 3D surface recovery accuracy in complex-structured areas, such as edges and crinkles, where existing learning-based methods often failed. Instead of using a uniform penalty for all pixels, our method employs the attention-weighted loss learned in a self-supervise manner for each pixel, avoiding blurry reconstruction result in such difficult regions. The network first estimates a surface normal map and an adaptive attention map, and then the latter is used to calculate a pixel-wise attention-weighted loss that focuses on complex regions. In these regions, the attention-weighted loss applies higher weights of the detail-preserving gradient loss to produce clear surface reconstructions. Experiments on real datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms traditional photometric stereo algorithms and state-of-the-art learning-based methods.