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An empirical study on the effects of translucency on photometric stereo

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Abstract

We present an empirical study on the effects of translucency on photometric stereo. Our study shows that the impact on the accuracy of the photometric normals is related to the relative size of the geometrical features and the mean free path. We show that under simplified conditions, the obtained photometric normals are a blurred version of the true surface normals, where the blur kernel is directly related to the subsurface scattering profile. We furthermore investigate the impact of scattering albedo, index of refraction, and single scattering on the accuracy. We perform our analysis using simulations, and demonstrate the validity on a real world example.

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Notes

  1. Scattering albedo is defined as: \(\alpha= \frac{\sigma_{s}}{\sigma_{s}+\sigma _{a}}\); the ratio of scattering over scattering+absorption. Mean free path is defined as: \({{l_{d}}}= \frac{1}{\sigma_{s}+\sigma_{a}}\).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Google, and NSF grants IIS-1016703 and IIS-1217765. The first author acknowledges additional support from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.

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  1. College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA

    Kathleen D. Moore & Pieter Peers

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  1. Kathleen D. Moore
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Correspondence to Kathleen D. Moore.

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Moore, K.D., Peers, P. An empirical study on the effects of translucency on photometric stereo. Vis Comput 29, 817–824 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0832-2

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