Discriminative shape from shading in uncalibrated illumination

Estimating surface normals from just a single image is challenging. To simplify the problem, previous work focused on special cases, including directional lighting, known reflectance maps, etc., making shape from shading impractical outside the lab. To cope with more realistic settings, shading cues need to be combined and generalized to natural illumination. This significantly increases the complexity of the approach, as well as the number of parameters that require tuning. Enabled by a new large-scale dataset for training and analysis, we address this with a discriminative learning approach to shape from shading, which uses regression forests for efficient pixel-independent prediction and fast learning. Von Mises-Fisher distributions in the leaves of each tree enable the estimation of surface normals. To account for their expected spatial regularity, we introduce spatial features, including texton and silhouette features. The proposed silhouette features are computed from the occluding contours of the surface and provide scale-invariant context. Aside from computational efficiency, they enable good generalization to unseen data and importantly allow for a robust estimation of the reflectance map, extending our approach to the uncalibrated setting. Experiments show that our discriminative approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world datasets.