A new symmetric shape from shading algorithm with an application to 3-D face reconstruction

This paper presents a new symmetric shape from shading (SFS) algorithm where the self-ratio image irradiance equation proposed by Zhao and Chellappa is formulated as a partial differential equation (PDE) with a Dirichlet boundary condition. This PDE is solved using the Lax-Friedrichs sweeping method. The potential of the proposed symmetric SFS algorithm is demonstrated by several experiments on synthetic and real data. As an application, the proposed algorithm is used for 3-D face reconstruction.