Fast Shape from Shading for Phong-Type Surfaces

Shape from Shading (SfS) is one of the oldest problems in image analysis that is modelled by partial differential equations (PDEs). The goal of SfS is to compute from a single 2-D image a reconstruction of the depicted 3-D scene. To this end, the brightness variation in the image and the knowledge of illumination conditions are used. While the quality of models has reached maturity, there is still the need for efficient numerical methods that enable to compute sophisticated SfS processes for large images in reasonable time. In this paper we address this problem. We consider a so-called Fast Marching (FM) scheme,which is one of the most efficient numerical approaches available. However, the FM scheme is not trivial to use for modern non-linear SfS models. We show how this is done for a recent SfS model incorporating the non-Lambertian reflectance model of Phong. Numerical experiments demonstrate that – without compromising quality – our FM scheme is two orders of magnitude faster than standard methods.