Estimating the unknown poses of a reference plane for specular shape recovery

This paper addresses the problem of recovering the unknown poses of a moving reference plane for specular shape recovery. Given the initial pose of the reference plane with respect to the camera, a closed form solution is derived to recover its subsequent poses directly from its reflections on the specular surface observed in the image sequence. With the estimated poses of the reference plane, the specular surface can then be easily recovered using any existing ray triangulation method. The proposed method greatly simplifies the calibration problem in specular shape recovery. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data are presented, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.