Towards Accurate Recovery of Shape from Shading under Diffuse Lighting

A. James Stewart and Michael S. Langer

Abstract

We present a novel surface radiance model for diffuse lighting conditions that incorporates shadows, interreflections, and surface orientation. We show that, for smooth surfaces, the model is an excellent approximation of the radiosity equation. We present a new data structure and algorithm that uses this model to compute shape--from--shading under diffuse lighting. The algorithm was tested on both synthetic and real images, and was found to perform more accurately than the only previous algorithm for this problem. Various causes of error are discussed, including approximation errors in image modelling, poor constraints at the image boundary, and ill-conditioning of the problem itself.

The Paper

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@inproceedings{SL-cvpr96,
  author    = "A. James Stewart and Michael S. Langer",
  title     = "Towards Accurate Recovery of Shape from Shading under
               Diffuse Lighting",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision
               and Pattern Recognition",
  year      = "1996",
  month     = "June",
  pages     = "411--416"
}

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