Estimating illumination direction of three-dimensional surface texture based on active basis and Mojette transform

Abstract

This paper describes an approach that, given an image of a rough surface texture, can estimate the direction from which the surface was lit. Unlike previous work, we require neither surface isotropy nor that the texture is included in the training set. The approach is based on Active Basis and the Mojette transform. The Mojette transform is used to estimate the orientation of the texture; it does so by finding which training samples have similar orientation features. The Active Basis model is then learned from training images by the shared pursuit algorithm. Next, the base histograms of the test image and textures with similar orientation features in the training set are compared so that the illumination directions can be estimated by minimizing their correlation coefficients.3