We present a novel framework to learn to convert the per-pixel photometric information at each view into spatially distinctive and view-invariant low-level features, which can be plugged into existing multi-view stereo pipeline for enhanced 3D reconstruction. Both the illumination conditions during acquisition and the subsequent per-pixel feature transform can be jointly optimized in a differentiable fashion. Our framework automatically adapts to and makes efficient use of the geometric information available in different forms of input data. High-quality 3D reconstructions of a variety of challenging objects are demonstrated on the data captured with an illumination multiplexing device, as well as a point light. Our results compare favorably with state-of-the-art techniques.

We propose neural trace photography, a novel framework to automatically learn high-quality scanning of non-planar, complex anisotropic appearance. Our key insight is that free-form appearance scanning can be cast as a geometry learning problem on unstructured point clouds, each of which represents an image measurement and the corresponding acquisition condition. Based on this connection, we carefully design a neural network, to jointly optimize the lighting conditions to be used in acquisition, as well as the spatially independent reconstruction of reflectance from corresponding measurements. Our framework is not tied to a specific setup, and can adapt to various factors in a data-driven manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on a number of physical objects with a wide variation in appearance. The objects are captured with a light-weight mobile device, consisting of a single camera and an RGB LED array. We also generalize the framework to other common types of light sources, including a point, a linear and an area light.