Photometric stereo under perspective projection

Photometric stereo is a fundamental approach in computer vision. At its core lies a set of image irradiance equations each taken with a different illumination. The vast majority of studies in this field have assumed orthography as the projection model. This paper re-examines the basic set of equations of photometric stereo, under an assumption of perspective projection. We show that the resulting system is linear (as is the case under the orthographic model; Nevertheless, the unknowns are different in the perspective case). We then suggest a simple reconstruction algorithm based on the perspective formulae, and compare it to its orthographic counterpart on synthetic as well as real images. This algorithm obtained lower error rates than the orthographic one in all of the error measures. These findings strengthen the hypothesis that a more realistic set of assumptions, the perspective one, improves reconstruction significantly.