Uncalibrated flatfielding and illumination vector estimationfor photometric stereo face reconstruction

Within the context of photometric stereo reconstruction, flatfielding may be used to compensate for the effect of the inverse-square law of light propagation on the pixel brightness. This would require capturing a set of reference images at an off-line imaging session, which employs a calibrating de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Machine vision and applications 2014-07, Vol.25 (5), p.1317-1332
Main Authors: Angelopoulou, Maria E., Petrou, Maria
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Calibration
Communications Engineering
Computer Science
Human
Illumination
Image Processing and Computer Vision
Image reconstruction
Light
Mathematical analysis
Networks
On-line systems
Original Paper
Pattern Recognition
Photometry
Reconstruction
Vectors (mathematics)
Vision systems
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Summary:Within the context of photometric stereo reconstruction, flatfielding may be used to compensate for the effect of the inverse-square law of light propagation on the pixel brightness. This would require capturing a set of reference images at an off-line imaging session, which employs a calibrating device that should be captured under the exact conditions as the main session. Similarly, the illumination vectors, on which photometric stereo relies, are typically precomputed based on another dedicated calibration session. In practice, implementing such off-line sessions is inconvenient and often infeasible. This work aims at enabling accurate photometric stereo reconstruction for the case of non-interactive on-line capturing of human faces. We propose unsupervised methodologies, which extract all information that is required for accurate face reconstruction from the images of interest themselves. Specifically, we propose an uncalibrated flatfielding and an uncalibrated illumination vector estimation methodology, and we assess their effect on photometric stereo face reconstruction. Results demonstrate that incorporating our methodologies into the photometric stereo framework halves the reconstruction error, while eliminating the need of off-line calibration.
ISSN:0932-8092
1432-1769
DOI:10.1007/s00138-014-0609-2