Photometric Stereo Calibration Using Constraint on Light Source Directions

This paper proposes one method on photometric stereo calibration using the constraint on light source directions in which the light sources have the unknown tilt and slant angles but the slant angles are the same. First, the constraint is analyzed based on the equation of linear ambiguity which leads to the conclusion that another constraint should be added to solve the calibration completely. Later, the combination of constraint on light source directions and the constraint that there exists at least six surface patches having known albedos is exploited to resolve the linear ambiguity up to an accurate and close-form solution. The effective performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiment results.