Surface reconstruction using isocontours of constant depth and gradient

While most photometric stereo algorithms assume Lambertian reflectance model for its simplicity, surfaces in general are not Lambertian. Some recent photometric stereo algorithms [1, 2] can recover iso-depth and iso-grandient contours for arbitrary isotropic surfaces by exploiting more general reflectance properties. However, further reconstruction of the 3D surface requires additional information, such as the normal at a point or depth along a boundary as suggested in [2]. This paper addresses the problem of reconstructing the surface from iso-depth and iso-gradient contours without such kind of additional information. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.