Paper · arXiv 2506.18882
Light of Normals: Unified Feature Representation for Universal Photometric Stereo
Hong Li, Houyuan Chen, Chongjie Ye, Zhaoxi Chen, Bohan Li, Shaocong Xu, Xianda Guo, Xuhui Liu, Yikai Wang, Baochang Zhang, Satoshi Ikehata, Boxin Shi, Anyi Rao, Hao Zhao
Photometric stereo aims to recover high-quality surface normals under arbitrary lighting conditions, addressing challenges related to illumination-surface normal coupling and high-frequency geometric detail preservation.
Abstract
Universal photometric stereo (PS) aims to recover high-quality surface normals from objects under arbitrary lighting conditions without relying on specific illumination models. Despite recent advances such as SDM-UniPS and Uni MS-PS, two fundamental challenges persist: 1) the deep coupling between varying illumination and surface normal features, where ambiguity in observed intensity makes it difficult to determine whether brightness variations stem from lighting changes or surface orientation; and 2) the preservation of high-frequency geometric details in complex surfaces, where intricate geometries create self-shadowing, inter-reflections, and subtle normal variations that conventional feature processing operations struggle to capture accurately.