DRM-Based Colour Photometric Stereo Using Diffuse-Specular Separation for Non-Lambertian Surfaces

Abstract

This paper presents a photometric stereo (PS) method based on the dichromatic reflectance model (DRM) using colour images. The proposed method estimates surface orientations for surfaces with non-Lambertian reflectance using diffuse-specular separation and contains two steps. The first step, referred to as diffuse-specular separation, initialises surface orientations in a specular invariant colour subspace and further separates the diffuse and specular components in the RGB space. In the second step, the surface orientations are refined by first initialising specular parameters via solving a log-linear regression problem owing to the separation and then fitting the DRM using Levenburg-Marquardt algorithm. Since reliable information from diffuse reflection free from specularities is adopted in the initialisations, the proposed method is robust and feasible with less observations. At pixels where dense non-Lambertian reflectances appear, signals from specularities are exploited to refine the surface orientations and the additionally acquired specular parameters are potentially valuable for more applications, such as digital relighting. The effectiveness of the newly proposed surface normal refinement step was evaluated and the accuracy in estimating surface orientations was enhanced around 30% on average by including this step. The proposed method was also proven effective in an experiment using synthetic input images comprised of twenty-four different reflectances of dielectric materals. A comparison with nine other PS methods on five representative datasets further prove the validity of the proposed method.