High Quality Shape from a Single RGB-D Image under Uncalibrated Natural Illumination

Yudeog Han, Joon-Young Lee, In So Kweon; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 1617-1624

We present a novel framework to estimate detailed shape of diffuse objects with uniform albedo from a single RGB-D image. To estimate accurate lighting in natural illumination environment, we introduce a general lighting model consisting of two components: global and local models. The global lighting model is estimated from the RGB-D input using the low-dimensional characteristic of a diffuse reflectance model. The local lighting model represents spatially varying illumination and it is estimated by using the smoothlyvarying characteristic of illumination. With both the global and local lighting model, we can estimate complex lighting variations in uncontrolled natural illumination conditions accurately. For high quality shape capture, a shapefrom-shading approach is applied with the estimated lighting model. Since the entire process is done with a single RGB-D input, our method is capable of capturing the high quality shape details of a dynamic object under natural illumination. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method that dramatically improves shape details of the rough depth input.