Automatic correction of non-uniform illumination for 3D surface heightmap reconstruction

For the three-dimensional surface texture can display the texture information of the object better than the two-dimensional illumination and the view angles; it is widely used in virtual reality and computer games. Photometric Stereo, as one of the effective technologies for capture of three-dimensional surface texture information, has attracted wide attention. Uniform illumination is the essential condition for the capture and reconstruction of three-dimensional surface texture using Photometric Stereo. In practice, non-uniform illumination leads to distorted surface height maps during the capture and reconstruction processes. This paper proposes a simple method to automatic correction of non-uniform illuminate for 3D surface height map reconstruction and to eliminate this kind of distortion and aberration. The experimental result shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.