Surface radiance correction for shape from shading

It is well known that many surfaces exhibit reflectance that is not well modelled by Lambert’s law. This is the case not only for surfaces that are rough or shiny, but also those that are matte and composed of materials that are particle suspensions. As a result, standard Lambertian shape-from-shading methods can not be applied directly to the analysis of rough and shiny surfaces. In order to overcome this difficulty, in this paper, we consider how to reconstruct the Lambertian component for rough and shiny surfaces when the object is illuminated in the viewing direction (retroreflection). To do this we make use of the diffuse reflectance models described by Oren and Nayar, and by Wolff. Our experiments with synthetic and real-world data reveal the effectiveness of the correction method, leading to improved surface normal and height recovery.