Recovery of surfaces with discontinuities by fusing shading and range data within a variational framework

This work provides a variational framework for fusing range and intensity data for recovering regularized surfaces. It is shown that this framework provides natural boundary conditions for the shape-from-shading problem, results in a new shape-from-shading formulation in the absence of range data, and provides a new fusion paradigm when range data is incorporated. The approach is demonstrated on simulated range and intensity images; error analysis with respect to the ground truth surface is presented. It is shown that the formulation performs well even in very noisy images.