A study of shape from photometry for diffuse and specular reflection models

This paper proposes a method — shape from photometry — to recovery the surface information with three images illuminated by three point light sources. Since the shape from photometry is based on the gray level of the illuminated surface image, the reflectance models are the major roles in shape recovery. The reflectance models are the Lambertian and specular. The algorithms have been tested on synthetic images of diffuse and specular surfaces, and obtained satisfactory results.