Scattering Parameters and Surface Normals from Homogeneous Translucent Materials using Photometric Stereo

Bo Dong, Kathleen D. Moore, Weiyi Zhang, Pieter Peers; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 2291-2298

This paper proposes a novel photometric stereo solution to jointly estimate surface normals and scattering parameters from a globally planar, homogeneous, translucent object. Similar to classic photometric stereo, our method only requires as few as three observations of the translucent object under directional lighting. Naively applying classic photometric stereo results in blurred photometric normals. We develop a novel blind deconvolution algorithm based on inverse rendering for recovering the sharp surface normals and the material properties. We demonstrate our method on a variety of translucent objects.