Color Photometric Stereo for Albedo and Shape Reconstruction

A new color photometric stereo method is presented, which reconstructs both albedo and shape from three color images. Optical polarization filters are placed in front of the light source and a camera to capture images free from specular reflection components. First, the albedo maps are derived from three color images. Then, the shape is reconstructed based on the Lambertian reflection from both the images and the albedo maps, using the Jacobi iterative method. The reconstruction is optimized using local and global weights, to minimize degradations due to shadows and saturations in images and color-dependent reflection characteristics of objects. Experimental results are given to evaluate the method.