We address the problem of robust normal reconstruction by dense photometric stereo, in the presence of complex geometry, shadows, highlight, transparencies, variable attenuation in light intensities, and inaccurate estimation in light directions. The input is a dense set of noisy photometric images, conveniently captured by using a very simple set-up consisting of a digital video camera, a reflective mirror sphere, and a handheld spotlight. We formulate the dense photometric stereo problem as a Markov network and investigate two important inference algorithms for Markov Random Fields (MRFs)--graph cuts and belief propagation--to optimize for the most likely setting for each node in the network. In the graph cut algorithm, the MRF formulation is translated into one of energy minimization. A discontinuity-preserving metric is introduced as the compatibility function, which allows alpha-expansion to efficiently perform the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. Using the identical dense input and the same MRF formulation, our tensor belief propagation algorithm recovers faithful normal directions, preserves underlying discontinuities, improves the normal estimation from one of discrete to continuous, and drastically reduces the storage requirement and running time. Both algorithms produce comparable and very faithful normals for complex scenes. Although the discontinuity-preserving metric in graph cuts permits efficient inference of optimal discrete labels with a theoretical guarantee, our estimation algorithm using tensor belief propagation converges to comparable results, but runs faster because very compact messages are passed and combined. We present very encouraging results on normal reconstruction. A simple algorithm is proposed to reconstruct a surface from a normal map recovered by our method. With the reconstructed surface, an inverse process, known as relighting in computer graphics, is proposed to synthesize novel images of the given scene under user-specified light source and direction. The synthesis is made to run in real time by exploiting the state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU). Our method offers many unique advantages over previous relighting methods and can handle a wide range of novel light sources and directions.

We address the normal reconstruction problem by photometric stereo using a uniform and dense set of photometric images captured at fixed viewpoint. Our method is robust to spurious noises caused by highlight and shadows and non-Lambertian reflections. To simultaneously recover normal orientations and preserve discontinuities, we model the dense photometric stereo problem into two coupled Markov random fields (MRFs): a smooth field for normal orientations, and a spatial line process for normal orientation discontinuities. We propose a very fast tensorial belief propagation method to approximate the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution of the Markov network. Our tensor-based message passing scheme not only improves the normal orientation estimation from one of discrete to continuous, but also reduces storage and running time drastically. A convenient handheld device was built to collect a scattered set of photometric samples, from which a dense and uniform set on the lighting direction sphere is obtained. We present very encouraging results on a wide range of difficult objects to show the efficacy of our approach.

We present a surprisingly simple system that allows for robust normal reconstruction by photometric stereo using a uniform and dense set of photometric images captured at fixed viewpoint, in the presense of spurious noises caused by highlight, shadows and non-Lambertian reflections. Our system consists of a mirror sphere, a spotlight and a DV camera only. Using this, a dense set of unbiased but noisy photometric data that roughly distributed uniformly on the light direction sphere is produced. To simultaneously recover normal orientations and preserve discontinuities, we model the dense photometric stereo problem into two coupled Markov random fields (MRFs): a smooth field for normal orientations, and a spatial line process for normal orientation discontinuities. A very fast tensorial belief propagation method is used to approximate the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution of the Markov network. We present very encouraging results on a wide range of difficult objects to show the efficacy of our approach.