A novel approach to photometric motion

• Published in: Image and vision computing 2007, Vol.25 (1), p.126-135
• Main Authors: Torreão, José R.A., Fernandes, João L., Leitão, Helena C.G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Photometric motion; Physics-based vision; Shape from shading
• ISSN: 0262-8856; 1872-8138
• DOI: 10.1016/j.imavis.2005.12.004

Photometric motion, as introduced by Pentland, employs both reflectance map and optical flow information for the estimation of shape from image sequences of dynamic scenes. It is thus a coupled geometric/photometric process, similarly as the disparity-based photometric stereo, which combines matching and image irradiance equations for surface reconstruction from photometric stereo input. Exploiting the parallel between those two processes, we have arrived at a novel formulation for the photometric-motion shape estimation problem, whose distinctive feature is that of being based on the irradiance change, due to the motion, at a given point in the image plane, and not, as in Pentland's proposal, at a fixed location on the moving surface. We are thus able to obtain an easily implementable procedure which yields good-quality shape estimates for rotating surfaces, and which can also be extended to single-input shape reconstruction.