Surface topography using shape-from-shading

This paper demonstrates how a recently reported shape-from-shading scheme can be used to extract topographic information from 2D intensity imagery. The shape-from-shading scheme has two novel ingredients. Firstly, it uses a geometric update procedure which allows the image irradiance equation to be satisfied as a hard-constraint. This not only improves the data-closeness of the recovered needle-map, but also removes the necessity for extensive parameter tuning. Secondly, we use curvature information to impose topographic constraints on the recovered needle-map. The topographic information is captured using the shape-index of Koenderink and VanDoorn (1992) and consistency is imposed using a robust error function. We show that the new shape-from-shading scheme leads to a meaningful topographic labelling of 3D surface structures.