Helmholtz Stereopsis on rough and strongly textured surfaces

Abstract

Helmholtz Stereopsis (HS) has recently been explored as a promising technique for capturing shape of objects with unknown reflectance. So far, it has been widely applied to objects of smooth geometry and piecewise uniform Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF). Moreover, for nonconvex surfaces the inter-reflect ion effects have been completely neglected. We extend the method to surfaces which exhibit strong texture, nontrivial geometry and are possibly nonconvex. The problem associated with these surface features is that Helmholtz reciprocity is apparently violated when point-based measurements are used independently to establish the matching constraint as in the standard HS implementation. We argue that the problem is avoided by computing radiance measurements on image regions corresponding exactly to projections of the same surface point neighbourhood with appropriate scale. The experimental results demonstrate the success of the novel method proposed on real objects.