Shape From Polarization With Distant Lighting Estimation

This article presents a new approach for surface normal recovery from polarization images under an unknown distant light. Polarization provides rich cues of object geometry and material, but it is also influenced by different lighting conditions. Different from previous Shape-from-Polarization (SfP) methods, which rely on handcrafted or data-driven priors, we analytically investigate the benefits of estimating distant lighting for resolving the ambiguity in normal estimation from SfP using the polarimetric Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (pBRDF) based image formation model. We then propose a two-stage learning framework that first effectively exploits polarization and shading cues to estimate the reflectance and lighting information and then optimizes the initial normal as the geometric prior. Leveraging the normal prior with the polarization cues from the input images, our network further generates the surface normal with more details in the second stage. We also present a data generation pipeline derived from the pBRDF model enabling model training and create a real dataset for evaluation of SfP approaches. Extensive ablation studies show the effectiveness of our designed architecture, and our approach outperforms existing methods in quantitative and qualitative experiments on real data.