Binocular Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo

In Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo (UPS), the surface normals and light sources are determined up to a group of ambiguous Generalized Bas-Relief (GBR) transformations. However, it has been shown by previous works to be rather troublesome to solve these ambiguities. In this paper, a framework of Binocular Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo (B-UPS) is given for accurate stereo matching for lambertian and non-lambertian objects. It is also shown that the problem of 3D reconstruction with UPS is converted into that of stereo matching with B-UPS. By this conversion, the intractable GBR transformations can be bypassed. In B-UPS, the Orientation-Consistency cue (OC) [1] for distant-lighting condition and Local-Orientation-Consistency (LOC) cue for non-distant lighting condition are used together for stereo matching, where the combination of both cues is made possible by a planar-area detection method based on a pseudo-normal-map segmentation scheme. Excellent matching and reconstruction results for objects with constant and spatial-varying BRDF demonstrate the superiority of B-UPS.