Learning Photometric Stereo via Manifold-based Mapping

Three-dimensional reconstruction technologies are fundamental problems in computer vision. Photometric stereo recovers the surface normals of a 3D object from varying shading cues, prevailing in its capability for generating fine surface normal. In recent years, deep learning-based photometric stereo methods are capable of improving the surface-normal estimation under general non-Lambertian surfaces, due to its powerful fitting ability on the non-Lambertian surface. These state-of-the-art methods however usually regress the surface normal directly from the high-dimensional features, without exploring the embedded structural information. This results in the underutilization of the information available in the features. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient manifold-based framework for learning-based photometric stereo, which can better map combined high-dimensional feature spaces to low-dimensional manifolds. Extensive experiments show that our method, learning with the low-dimensional manifolds, achieves more accurate surface-normal estimation, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods on the challenging DiLiGenT benchmark dataset.