Reflectance estimation from motion under complex illumination

In this paper, we propose a method for recovering the reflectance properties of a moving Lambertian object from an image sequence of the object taken by a fixed camera under unknown, complex illumination. Our proposed method is based on the spherical-harmonic representation of Lambertian reflectance under arbitrary illumination. Then, by combining the geometry reconstructed by shape-from-motion (SFM), we recover the albedo of the object and the illumination distribution only from the image sequence of the moving object. The proposed method enables us to synthesize realistic images of the object in arbitrary poses under arbitrary lighting conditions by using reconstructed shape and albedo. We conducted a number of experiments by using both synthetic and real images to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.