A practical means for calibrating an LED-based photometric stereo system

•The LED emitting model is introduced to depict the lights and image irradiance.•With the proposed method, the near-field light source position can be calibrated.•All the positions of other LED lamps can be calculated based the calibrated LED.•An optimization procedure is introduced to improve the robustness of the results.

Conventional Photometric Stereo (PS) techniques are usually based on the assumption that the light sources are assumed sufficiently far from the object that all incoming light can be modeled using parallel rays. Meanwhile, for near-field lighting conditions the light sources are close to the object so the parallel ray model cannot be used. To determine the surface normal for each point on the object more accurately, the incoming light direction should be calculated individually for each point. In this work, based on a simple PS setup consisting of LED lamps and one camera, we present a practical method for calibrating lighting directions. First, an optical model of an LED was introduced in the calibration procedure to represent the surface irradiance and image irradiance more accurately. A reference sphere was used for the calibration so that the LED optical axis could be estimated by extracting the specular points from the reference sphere. By introducing the LED emitting model, distance between the LED and the specular point along the optical axis can be calculated. Thus, the incident lighting directions for various image points can be estimated individually. To improve the estimation robustness, a non-linear fitting approach was also applied. Experiments were conducted using objects and the results are compared with traditional methods to demonstrate its feasibility and improvement.