A method for determining three-dimensional surface orientation of objects with textures

To reconstruct the shape of an object from its image, the conventional photometric stereo method requires a preprocessing (e.g., region segmentation based on gray levels) unless the reflectance of its surface is uniform and known; and the method is applicable only to a part of the surface illuminated by more than three light sources. This paper proposes a method based on the photometric stereo method, but with the newly introduced restriction conditions so that the method can be applied without preprocessing to an object with surface texture including regions illuminated by fewer than three light sources. The method has been applied successfully to two spherical objects: the mean square error in the reconstruction of an object where surface texture is 0.01723, and that without texture is 0.002063.