Can lens distortion be calibrated from an image of a smooth, textureless Lambertian surface?

This paper addresses the problem of lens distortion calibration from a single image of a smooth, textureless surface. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been addressed before in the literature. We show that this is possible, both theoretically and practically, taking advantage of some local shading measures that vary nonlinearly as a function of lens distortion. The proposed method is easy to use and requires no specific feature extraction from images. Experiments on simulations and real data are reported and compared to well-known techniques.