Robust photometric stereo using structural light sources

Abstract

We propose a robust photometric stereo method by using structural arrangement of light sources. In the arrangement, light sources are positioned on a planar grid and form a set of collinear combinations. The shadow pixels are detected by adaptive thresholding. The specular highlight and diffuse pixels are distinguished according to their intensity deviations of the collinear combinations, thanks to the special arrangement of light sources. The highlight detection problem is cast as a pattern classification problem and is solved using support vector machine classifiers. Considering the possible misclassification of highlight pixels, the l 1 regularization is further employed in normal map estimation. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world scenes verify that the proposed method can robustly recover the surface normal maps in the case of heavy specular reflection and outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.