Shape from Texture: Fast Estimation of Planar Surface Orientation via Fourier Analysis

Shape from texture has received much attention in the past few decades. We propose a computationally efficient method to extract 3D planar surface orientation from the spectral variations of a visual texture. Under the assumption of homogeneity, the texture is represented by the novel method of identifying ridges of its Fourier transform. Local spatial frequencies are then computed using a minimal set of selected Gabor filters. Under perspective projection, frequencies are backprojected and orientation is computed so as to minimize the variance of the frequencies’ backprojections. A comparative study with two existing methods, and experimentation on simulated and real texture images is given.