Solving the uncalibrated photometric stereo problem using total variation

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new method to solve the problem of uncalibrated photometric stereo, making very weak assumptions on the properties of the scene to be reconstructed. Our goal is to solve the generalized bas-relief ambiguity (GBR) by performing a total variation regularization of both the estimated normal field and albedo. Unlike most of the previous attempts to solve this ambiguity, our approach does not rely on any prior information about the shape or the albedo, apart from its piecewise smoothness. We test our method on real images and obtain results comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.